John Henry Holland Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Louis L. Martz

Critical Essay by Louis L. Martz

Hollander has written his Reflections on Espionage in the form of a single long poem composed in strict eleven-syllable lines, except for twenty-one lines at the very end which contain a clever cipher carefully explicated in the author's notes. Hendecasyllabic verse, then, is the "eleven-phase transposition grid" used by the secret agent Cupcake for transmitting in cipher his messages to other agents and ultimately to his director, named Lyrebird. All this of course is derived from the recent flurry of revelations about espionage and counterespionage in the Second World War, as represented in Sir John Masterman's The Double-Cross System (1972), which reveals such code-names for agents as Biscuit, Dragonfly, Cobweb, Zigzag, Tricycle, Garbo, Lipstick, The Snark, and so on. Hollander takes off from here with a galaxy of names that would delight any counterspy: Thumbtack, Image, The Foot, Aspirin, Steampump, Artifact, Gland, Felucca…. It will already be evident from some...
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