TRANSLATING THE POET: ALEXANDER POPE'S ENGAGEMENT WITH THE HOMERIC BIOGRAPHICAL TRADITION IN HIS TRANSLATIONS OF THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY

This article explores Alexander Pope's experience as a translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, particularly his engagement with Homer as a poet and his biographical tradition. The study focuses on how Homer features in Pope's correspondence as he worked on the translations, how the Greek poet is described in the prefatory essay by Thomas Parnell and Pope's own notes to the text, and finally how his physical presence materializes in the illustrations within Pope's translations. The article suggests that, by engaging with the biography of Homer, Pope explores issues such as poetic authority and divine inspiration, promotes his own translations against European competitors, and ultimately establishes himself as a translator and as a poet. Throughout the process, Homer appears as a presence that forces Pope constantly to challenge himself, until he feels he can stand a comparison with the greatest poet ever.

Poetry

‘AUIEO’ (Convivio IV, vi, 3): midway in his career, Dante explores an etymology for poetic authority that singles out poets as those who join together words with rhyme and rhythm. In his linguistic thought, Dante views poetry as a form of ‘binding’ that stabilizes and preserves the vernacular, and turns it into an established language (a ‘grammar’, like Latin or Greek), without annihilating the vitality of the natural language. This chapter argues that the reach of poetry in Dante’s work extends well beyond language, to become a true episteme that is able to accurately read and retell the world and even God. Disenfranchised from the burden of authenticity and authentication (and also from automatism and replication), the poet forges a new outlook on the universe, and endows poetry with powers of exploration and reflection, whilst still retaining its lyrical genetic code and its links to affectivity and individuality.

Chaucer and the Textualities of Troy

This chapter traces the transmission of the matter of Troy from its entrance into the textual traditions of the Latin West until Chaucer’s composition of Troilus and Criseyde. This tradition includes late antique Latin prose texts attributed to Dares and Dictys, the twelfth-century Roman de Troie composed by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Guido delle Colonne, as well as the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à Cèsar. The narrator of Chaucer’s Troilus exhibits the poet’s self-conscious awareness of this complex textual network. The subject-position of Criseyde as a woman living within a city under siege is the product of this textual tradition. The second book of Chaucer’s House of Fame stages the poetic authority for the textual traditions on Troy.

Asinine Heroism and the Mediation of Empire in Chaucer, Marlowe, and Shakespeare

What are the consequences of reading Shakespeare’s allusions to classical heroes through vernacular adaptations rather than through classical texts? This essay reframes the debate about which classical sources Shakespeare consulted, arguing that he encountered Aeneas and Theseus primarily through vernacular authors. Vernacular literature’s depictions of the mythic founders of Rome and Athens foreground classical heroes’ treachery and duplicity and minimize their roles as progenitors of empire and culture. Shakespeare’s quotation strategies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream follow Marlowe and Nashe’s model in Dido, Queen of Carthage by looking to Chaucer as the poetic authority for classical myth. Like Chaucer, both playwrights foreground the destruction left in empire’s wake. A Midsummer Night’s Dream imagines a retelling of Dido’s story that privileges her authority over an interloping male hero. In the asinine Bottom, Shakespeare offers an antidote to the exploitative model of heroism embodied in Theseus and Aeneas through a mock-heroic retelling of Aeneas’s most renowned crime.

The Names of the Muses

The chapter explores Hesiod’s presentation and etymology of the Muses’ names in the proem of the Theogony. The catalogue of the Muses’ names at vv. 77–9 is prepared by the preceding narrative that repeats words and word-parts cognate with these names. This implicit etymological network has a bearing on questions of poetic authority, especially since it allows Hesiod to contrast his account of the Muses’ number and names from other traditional versions reflected in textual and artistic sources. Finally, the chapter considers the implicit etymological explanation of the narrator’s name Ἡσίοδος‎ in the Theogony proem, through which he conveys the homology of his and the Muses’ task and exerts influence on the contents and organization of the Muses’ song.

Poetry and the War(s)

Three new critical monographs remind us that, when it comes to war, poets have always been political. In their respective recent volumes, Tim Dayton, Rachel Galvin, and Adam Gilbert are concerned with the ways in which poets respond not only to war itself but also the ideology and propaganda that supports it, how their work resists or sometimes replicates these scripts, and the strategies they use to construct the poetic authority to address it. These critical texts, read together, reveal that resistance to hegemonic narratives is more complicated than simply writing an antiwar poem, that subverting the narratives of war requires some knowledge of how their sociopolitical and economic algorithms function to begin with. Dayton’s study offers a model of resistance to such narratives through its revealing juxtaposition of anachronistic or propagandistic poetic rhetoric with the true nature of and motives for the US’ participation in World War I. Galvin argues for the sociopolitical validity of the work of canonical modernist poets more recently disparaged as overly absorbed in aesthetic concerns. For Gilbert, poetry is an overlooked reservoir of knowledge bearing witness to the experience of US soldiers in the American War in Vietnam.