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In her long poem Solitude (1938) Vita Sackville-West explores the contrast between Nature and books and between Nature and the Christian God as she questions the purpose of life and suffering. While writing in solitude about solitude, the writer is connected to a vast community of other writers and readers. In this paper I show how Sackville-West uses classical allusions as a bridge between pagan Nature and Christian English literary history. From contemporary documents, especially her letters to Virginia Woolf, we can also see how Sackville-West kept an awkward balance in her own life between shyness and desire for connection with others which is reflected in her project of writing new verse in essentially traditional forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a comparative analysis of the original with the translation, this paper attempts to demonstrate the influence of Lucan's bellum civile on Hölderlin's poetic language and theory of cognition, over and above the contemporary, political interest of the text in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Although Hölderlin only translated verses 1-590 of the first book, it is there that Lucan uses poetic techniques which seem to have inspired the German poet. The most important of these is the linguistic and thematic development of the obscure; in its density, it may have represented to Hölderlin the ideal of the sublime. In particular, Lucan's light-metaphors seem to have left traces in Hölderlin's poetic œuvre. The interpretation focuses on a divination-scene which Lucan presents as an aesthetics of the terrifying, the radical breaking apart of gods, humankind and nature. In this cosmic chaos, the mediating function of the poet must be reconsidered: if he can no longer be a mediator, then the possibility of linguistic representation as a whole is called into question. A closer look at the last verses translated by Hölderlin shows the extent to which these doubts end in the aporia of speechlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"For Once, Then, Something" (1920) is the only poem Robert Frost ever composed in a classical meter: it is written in phalaecean hendecasyllabics. What led him to depart, in that single instance, from his declared commitment to native English meters? So far no scholar or critic has ventured to say. This paper offers an explanation, and points to a greater subtlety in Frost's engagement with Latin poetry than is usually proposed. Frost's poem is, among other things, a response to hostile critics. Scholars of Catullus - and Catullus was Frost's favorite Roman author - have pointed to a link between hendecasyllabics and the poetic mode of rebuttal to one's critics. That poets in the English tradition understood this link can be demonstrated by adducing two hendecasyllabic poems of Tennyson's: "Hendecasyllabics" (1863), in which the poet fires back at his magazine reviewers, and "The Gentle Life" (1870), in which he attacks his leading critic. An ardent admirer of Catullus, Tennyson naturally turned to the hendecasyllabic as the appropriate vehicle for such a response. I argue that by casting his own retort in hendecasyllabics, and by emulating other stylistic features in Catullus' hendecasyllabics, Frost places himself within this tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of Virgil on Martin Luther, paying special attention to a short verse composition of Luther's in Latin, Adversus Armatum Virum Cochlaeum, based on the first lines of the Aeneid. The study suggests that an adequate understanding of Luther's relationship to and use of Virgil needs to take into full account the fact that the Reformer not only knew Virgil's works and quoted from him frequently, but also himself composed verses based on Virgil's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal, discursive and contextual elements all play a part in the reception of ancient texts in modern poetry and drama. This article examines the simile as a formal technique which also generates and transmits intertextual relationships. It is argued that the simile also provides a model which illuminates the nexus between Walcott's technique and the ways in which audiences read and experience his work. The first section identifies ways in which the Homeric simile operates structurally within the epics and suggests that it acts as an agent of perspective transformation, changing the audience's perception both of the internal dynamics of the poem and of how the audience itself relates to the work. The second part of the paper explores this approach in relation to Walcott's Omeros, with particular emphasis on the relationship between Philoctetes/Philoctete and the anonymous narrator of the poem. The third section examines a broader application of the simile model in relation to performance of a modern work closely linked with a single ancient text, Walcott's Stage Version of the Odyssey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the 11th century, a humanist circle of clerical poets, living around the central valley of the Loire, was writing poetry in classical language and metre. Baudri of Bourgueil, who wrote an impressive corpus of Latin poems, was an expert in the language, style, verse, motifs and genres of the classical and later antique pagan and Christian poetry, and treated theological as well as profane and explicitly ancient topics. About 1107, when he was urged to become bishop and to abandon his personal independence and quiet monastic life, he gave voice to his disgust of the new ecclesiastical burden by a long poem in elegiac distichs. This paper tries to show the ancient genres Baudri has used and transformed and even inverted in order to describe his special situation. Therefore, in imitating the ancient genres, far from showing only his literary culture, he was rather using them in a very specific and personal way. This use of literary traditions can best be analyzed in terms of intertextuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "To R. B.," by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It states that the poem does not resemble Hopkins' style, and is aligned most closely with the exile poetry of Ovid. It mentions that the poem is an example of the self-referent, literary, and epistolary style that characterizes Ovid's poetic letters from exile. Furthermore, features that are unique in Hopkins' work including the metaphors, the focus on poetic creation, and the epistolary format are discussed.

The article reviews the poem "Amicissimo, et meritissimo Ben: Ionson," a poem in Latin by John Donne. It examines the poem in light of the comedy "Volpone" by Ben Jonson. The author addresses the deletion of the Latin word "veteres" from the text, arguing that it influences the meaning of the poem. The meaning of several Latin words and phrases are explored, including "quod," "quos," and "sumere." The syntactical complexity of the poem is emphasized.

Well-known Renaissance painters and writers who draw from Ovid's fragmentary calendar poem, the Fasti, tend to assimilate it to the more famous masterwork, the Metamorphoses. A group of humanist Latin poets, however, took inspiration from the central idea of Ovid's Fasti as a versified religious almanac. The Christian calendar poems vary widely in the degree to which they imitate the Ovidian exemplar. Of particular interest is Lodovico Lazzarelli's Fasti christianae religionis, which exhibits a kind of anxiety of influence by both embracing Ovid's Fasti as model and using it to exemplify the antique pagan festivals now supplanted by the true Christian faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The passage discussed in this article has two kinds of Hellenistic subtext, one pictorial and the other poetic. The pictorial is represented by the fresco in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii depicting Bacchus reclining on the bosom of a woman. The poetic subtext is the kind of Hellenistic epigram that describes the male lover as lying in the lap or on the bosom of the female beloved. Meleager and Philodemus provide examples. These, with the fresco, show that a Hellenistic model for the erotic schema of Mars and Venus was available to Lucretius. On this understanding, it becomes easier to explain the phrase tereti cervice (35), borrowed from Cicero's translation of the Phaenomena of Aratus. The conclusions to be drawn from this passage go counter to the prevailing view of a "sublime" Empedoclean Lucretius who had nothing in common with Hellenistic poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a great deal has been written about the British "soldier poets" of the First World War, critics have all but ignored the possibility that the classical tradition might be an important source of imagery and content for those poets. This article argues that, despite this critical silence, the classical tradition is in fact a crucial element in the formation of Great War poetry. The article examines the importance of classics and the classical tradition in the work of two poets in particular, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Wilfred Owen. The article provides background information on each poet and then turns to a detailed analysis of one poem by each poet. The article argues that the two poems analyzed, Sorley's "When you see millions of the mouthless dead" and Owen's "Strange Meeting," both depend very heavily on the classical and specifically the Homeric view of the underworld for their imagery. It further argues that any reading which overlooks the classical background of these poems will miss a great deal of the poems' impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the role of stringed instruments lauded in Pierre de Ronsard's 16th-century odes to exemplify the range of his poetic powers for National poetry based on the classical Roman poetry models, and Horace in particular. The article focuses on the poetic protagonist restorer of ancient instruments in the ode "A sa Lire," and the recognition of the epic-making potential of the Pindaric lyre in his ode "A son Luc." Also examined is the poem "A sa guiterre."

There was a great output of Latin love poetry by the Italian poets of the Quattrocento who also wrote vernacular love poems. In this production the interplay and even symbiosis of the two poetic languages is of great philological and esthetic interest. To illustrate this form of poetry I have chosen two early Latin lyrics of Poliziano, one more definitely within the Roman tradition and the other with more obvious affinities to vernacular love poetry, as examples of the fusion of styles and vocabulary characteristic of the genre. In so doing, the skillful adaptation of poetic currency from various periods of Latin and Italian literature will become apparent, from the classical love poets to the dolce stil novo, Petrarch, and Poliziano's own Italian poetry. In particular, these two Latin lyrics will be compared to vernacular lyrics of Lorenzo de' Medici on the same themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the classical tradition in the satire Latin poetry of of Lodovico Sergardi at the close of the 17th century, in particular his collection of satires entitled "Q. Sectani Satyrae (apud Triphonem Bibliopolam in Foro Palladio." Topics include his referencing of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, his use of topical references, as well as his use of Roman poets.

Presents an essay which argues that the reading of Derek Walcott's `Omeros' as an expansion of the traditional epic genre will offer a fruitful approach to the poem. Epic status of `Omeros'; Genres and sub-genres embedded in the text of `Omeros'; Representation of the human condition in the poem; Metaphoric density as lyric technique in `Omeros.'

The article analyzes the poetry book of satire called "In Eutropium," by Claudian, or Claudius Claudianus, a poet in the fourth century, focusing on his invective depiction of Roman consul eunuch Eutropius. Topics include Claudian's influence by Roman satire poet Juvenal, the depiction of Eutropius's rise and fall in the Roman consulate, and the depiction of homosexuality in Juvenal and Claudian.

Pietro Bembo's Latin poetry is worth studying in its own right and for how it reflects Bembo's views on imitatio and aemulatio. Two of Bembo's more successful poems, the short love elegies, Ad Melinum and Faunus ad Nymphas, demonstrate two kinds of imitatio. The former is an elaboration of Propertius 2.18.1-4 and the close verbal similarities with the model invite comparison with it. Bembo expands the four verses of Propertius into a poem that contains other Propertian features, but while Bembo adheres on one level to a single model the poem has a distinctly Ovidian tone. The relationship between Faunus ad Nymphas and its model is less obvious. Here Bembo's starting point is part of the speech of Polyphemus in Metamorphoses 13. Bembo transforms the rustic Polyphemus of his epic poem into a figure that is still rustic and naive but has characteristics of the more sophisticated and learned lover-poet of Latin elegy. Bembo remains true to Ovid as his model but in an interesting way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walcott's "Omeros" renames Homer out of a belief in the poet's Adamic opportunity to remake reality. The etymology of "Omeros" (O the sea's invocation, mer mother and sea, os grey bone and sibilant surf) "names" a poet who possesses the elemental language of a people rooted in their own place; who honors and benefits them by working that language; who knows nature as continuing creation; who is liberated from history as ephemeral praise and blame; and who is self-integrated owing to these gifts. The poet aspires toward this Omeros, kin to Heaney's Wordsworthian "owl-caller": "As he stand open like an eye or an ear, he becomes imprinted with all the melodies and hieroglyphs of the world; the workings of the active universe . . . are echoed far inside him.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To enhance the general account of Gray's Greek and Latin poetry, various pieces are analysed in detail for their extensive classical borrowings; plan English translations are juxtaposed. Attention is paid throughout to similarities of content and diction between these poems and Gray's English ones. Some special treatment is given to Gray's school and college verses, also Latin translations from the Greek Anthology where it may sometimes be possible to connect his choice of pieces with contemporary issues and personal feelings. His neglected Greek squib on smoking is examined for its verbal dexterity and wit within the context of tobacco in life and literature. Fanciful modern interpretations of (e.g.) the De Principiis Cogitandi are scouted, whilst the classical debts of the O lacrimarum fons are asserted against previous clams of dominant Old Testament influence. Finally, Gray's rights to authorship of two doubtfully ascribed poems are investigated and tentatively confirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sixteenth-century England witnessed a remarkable flowering of neo-Latin poetry. Hundreds of volumes of verse were printed, a sign both of the impact of humanism and the continuing vitality of the classical tradition. One of the most important and interesting Elizabethan Latin poets is John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich. His "Ludicra" of 1573 is a substantial volume of several thousand lines, containing epigrams, epitaphs, occasional verses, religious poetry, and, unusually for an Englishman of this period, passionate love poetry. The importance of this corpus of poetry is assessed, and the influence of Martial, Catullus and Prudentius is examined, as an aspect of the continuing importance of the classical tradition in sixteenth-century England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]