Coleridge’s Rome

Coleridge’s comparison between Napoleonic France and imperial Rome seeks to understand “revolutionary time,” that ostensibly new sense of time considered as a product of the French Revolution that sees the future as freed from past precedent. In the context of this seeming rupture between past and present, Coleridge associates the Roman transition from republic to empire with a particular pace and rate of change, and with slowness generally, a slowness that serves as a marked contrast to the apparent speed of his present moment. This chapter shows how Coleridge’s slow time is inextricable from the seeming speed and acceleration with which events were understood to develop in the aftermath of the French Revolution, in modernity. Coleridge returns processes of slow and gradual change into the French Revolution’s seeming rupture with the past.

Thoreau’s Epic Ambitions: “A Walk To Wachusett” and the Persistence of the Classics in an Age of Science

The piece is the earliest example in Thoreau of a prose genre now known as the excursion, which combines a brief autobiographical account of an experience of nature with broader philosophical meditations on the natural world. Moreover, in “A Walk to Wachusett,” Thoreau also uses quotations from and allusions to Virgil's own earliest extant poems (the eclogues) to recreate in prose the tension found throughout Virgil's poetry between the themes of the pastoral and those of epic. Thoreau also thereby allies his own literary career to the progression first followed by Virgil, from pastoral to georgic to epic, known as the cursus honorum. This renders problematic any simple notion that he became a scientist later in his career. Rather, his interests in natural science merged with his original goal of writing epic poetry, in his treatment of Pliny the Elder's Natural History.

“Past ruin’d Ilion”: The Classical Ideal and the Romantic Voice in Landor’s Poetry

This article argues that throughout his long career, Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) looked back to the classical past as both the source and the fullest embodiment of his literary ideal. It contends that besides the stylistic classicism often attributed to him, Landor brought the values of the classical and the Romantic into tension, engagement, and alignment with each other. In order to examine the interplay between these complementary visions of life, the article traces how Landor makes use of references and allusions to the classical past within his shorter lyric poems. As a case in point, it examines the group of poems written to and about his beloved Ianthe, analyzing the means—ranging from extended conceits to brief allusions and offhand or submerged references—by which Landor brought together the Romantic expression of personal experience with the universality, authority, and permanence that he associated with Greek and Latin literature.

The Classics and American Political Rhetoric in a Democratic and Romantic Age

This essay demonstrates that during the same period when new grammar schools, academies, and colleges were introducing the Greek and Roman classics to the western frontier of the United States, to a rising middle class, to girls and women, and to African Americans, states were expanding the voting population to include all free adult white males. While the spread of manhood suffrage led to a more democratic style of politics, the expansion of classical education ensured that American speeches continued to bristle with classical allusions. Political leaders took advantage of every opportunity to showcase their classical learning, even to broader audiences they hoped might respect, if not fully comprehend, their allusions. Classically trained, American politicians lived a double rhetorical life, attempting to assure common voters of their ability to empathize with their concerns while demonstrating their wisdom and virtue to constituents of all classes through their knowledge of the classics.

“In the face of the fire”: Melville’s Prometheus, Classical and Romantic Contexts

Prometheus is a crucial analogue through which Ishmael’s quest to know the whale, and Ahab’s quest to destroy it, are to be understood. Melville’s Promethean references are located in the context of literature about Prometheus (Hesiod, Aeschylus, Plato), more particularly in the context of the Romantics’ understanding of Prometheus (Goethe’s “Prometheus,” Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus). Melville had read Frankenstein before writing Moby-Dick. It seems sure that he had read both Aeschylus (a copy of Aeschylus’s plays bought in 1849 in London) and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (references to Demogorgon). This essay focuses not on source hunting but rather on how Melville refashioned the Romantic Prometheus to fit the kinds of opposed, paradoxical judgments that his imagination habitually evoked. Ahab’s compulsive Promethean need to “gaze too long in the face of the fire” (“The Try-Works”) emerges both as a daring heroism (on the Aeschylean pattern) and as a self-destructive solipsism of vengeance (in accord with Melville’s image of Narcissus as “the key to it all” in “Loomings”).

Changes of Address: Epic Invocation in Anglophone Romanticism

The epic poet’s invocation to the Muse is no sooner underway than it must demonstrate that the power it seeks has been conferred already. Inspiration is as inspiration does: this generic tautology came under chronic pressure within the dispensation of Romanticism, when epic greatness migrated into the psyche, creativity became heroism, and bards emerged as their own protagonists. This chapter analyzes variations on the classical template that were executed on either side of 1800 by poets major and minor, female and male, British and American. It shows how the convention of claiming the Muse’s favors became a feat that epitomized, at the threshold of the text, Romanticism’s epic adventure.

The Other Classic: Hebrew Shapes British and American Literature and Culture

Hebrew, once regarded as a “classical language,” exerts enormous shaping power on British and American poetry, politics, and culture from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. It prompts the greatest innovations in post-Renaissance English verse, developments in aesthetics, including the sublime, fruitful arguments in politics, and vital strands of British and American thought that cannot be accounted for otherwise. This shaping power—related to but not the same as the influence of biblical translations regarded as literature—has received only sporadic attention. Hebrew as the other classic has not obtained its rightful place in studies of literature in English, nor in Anglo-American literate culture. This essay explores the other classic in: British and American colleges and universities; Puritan Hebraists; concepts of the sublime; the seminal criticism of Robert Lowth; the work of Dennis, Watts, Smart, Macpherson, Merrick, Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Longfellow, and Lazarus; in myths of national origin and identification; in Coleridge, De Quincey, Thoreau, Melville, Arnold, and J. L. Lowes; as well as in an appreciation of the stylistic and moral strengths of Hebrew Scripture. It explores why study of Hebrew declined. The essay challenges the exclusion of Hebrew, upon which all discussion of “classical languages” and their reception by the romantics has been based. The presence of Hebrew as the other classic enlarges and redefines the nature of classical influences on the romantic era.

Remaking the Republic of Letters: James McCune Smith and the Classical Tradition

James McCune Smith, a leading black abolitionist, physician, and intellectual in nineteenth-century America, believed that classical literature could help Americans abolish slavery. Fluent in Greek and Latin, McCune Smith believed that the ancients offered cautionary tales for Americans. Their writings emphasized the urgency of abolishing slavery in America and establishing a “pure Republic” rather than another slave republic. With inspiration from the classical tradition, the U.S. could create a new “republic of letters” defined by a new vision of freedom and democracy. McCune Smith articulated this vision in the abolitionist press, most notably in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, in which he drew heavily from Anacreon, Terence, Virgil, Demosthenes, and Aristotle. The classical tradition could empower blacks and women as much as senators and statesmen.

Pilgrimage and Epiphany: The Psychological and Political Dynamics of Margaret Fuller’s Mythmaking

This essay opens up Margaret Fuller’s deep interest in, and wide acquaintance with, classical and other ancient mythologies, a sorely neglected subject. Fuller emerges as someone who tried to find comfort and solace in ancient myths, often identifying with female figures in them. Throughout, issues of what today we call feminism surface, not only in political and social contexts but also in that of the inner life of the psyche. Her use of ancient myths and creation of new, original myths sharply contrasts with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did not understand her deep need to apply this aspect of Greco-Roman religion to a personal and professional situation.

“Larger the shadows”: Longfellow’s Translation of Virgil’s Eclogue 1

“Larger the shadows” takes a close look at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Virgil’s “Eclogue 1” (1870), a poem that reflected his experience of change, both in himself and around him in his physical environment. A relentless foreignizer as a translator, Longfellow nevertheless found in Virgil a familiar, modern commitment to preserving “green” spaces. Translating Virgil, Longfellow recognized facets of himself in Virgil’s characters: he was both Tityrus, reclining in the shade, warbling inconsequential little tunes on his reed, as well as Meliboeus, haunted by nightmares of the impending loss of his semi-rural locus amoenus (notably contemporary efforts to open up the banks of the Charles River for development). The essay also offers a review of previous translations of Eclogue 1 and editions of Virgil used by Longfellow.