SOURCE: "Scott and Marmion: The Discovery of Identity," in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 66, No. 1, October, 1971, pp. 738-50.

Pikoulis is a Zimbabawean critic and educator. In the following essay, Pikoulis maintains that Marmion serves as a "poetic autobiography" for Scott. The critic analyzes the introductory epistles in the poem as well as the central tale of Marmion, concluding that the two parts work together to present the primary elements of the poet's identity.

It is part of the difficulty of the romance that its characteristic mode of operation strikes the modern reader as altogether foreign, the product and expression of an alien sensibility. It is not as if the ideas or the play of ideas fail to interest the writer of romances but that they need an embracing context of a lively and suspenseful plot and an amplitude of exposition which allows the writer's creative energy sufficient scope...