Poets and Critics Read Vergil

Michael J. Buckley

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780300143966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Vergil has exerted a stronger grasp on the poetic imagination and critical scholarship than almost any other poet. This absorbing book—a collection of essays and conversations by such leading poets and classicists as Joseph Brodsky, Christine Perkell, Michael C. J. Putnam, and Mark Strand—explores the ways in which Vergil’s work has inspired readers of today.

The book takes a broad look at questions of historicism: how we read a work written 2,000 years ago. There are not only close readings of the Aeneid, the Eclogues, and Georgics, but also essays dealing with such topics as Vergil’s influence from the Renaissance to the present. The book concludes with two special sections: a lively conversation on translation between Robert Fagles and Sarah Spence and a "virtual" roundtable discussion in which Spence has woven together the responses of poets and critics to Vergil’s poetry.

Sarah Spence is professor of classics at the University of Georgia.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Note on Text and Translations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: After Grief and Reason
• Part 1. The Frame
• 1. Imaginary Romans: Vergil and the Illusion of National Identity
• Part 2. The Canvas: Readings of Vergil
• Chapter 2. On Grief and Reason: Two Selections
• Chapter 3. Pastoral Value in Vergil: Some Instances
• Chapter 4. Aristaeus, Orpheus, and the Georgics: Once Again
• Chapter 5. Some Observations on Aeneid Book VI
• Chapter 6. Mortal Father, Divine Mother: Aeneid VI and VIII
• Chapter 7. Vergil’s Aeneid: The Final Lines
• Chapter 8. The End of the Aeneid
• Part 3. The Debate, or Stepping Out of the Frame
• Chapter 9. The Aeneid Transformed: Illustration as Interpretation from the Renaissance to the Present
• Chapter 10. Not-Blank-Verse: Surrey’s Aeneid Translations and the Prehistory of a Form
• Chapter 11. Vergil Reading Homer
• Chapter 12. Lacrimae Rerum: The Influence of Vergil on Poets and Scholars
• Notes
• Contributors