Reading Virgil Back to Front

Abstract: The literary past is altered by the present, argues T. S. Eliot in his famous essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). No one, he adds, should find this idea preposterous. But of course literally the idea is precisely that, preposterous (prae, before + posterus, later) or back to front, in that it reverses the commonsense direction of influence. Eliot’s argument is now taken (and perhaps even taken for granted) as a key premise of reception studies, which is always bidirectional. In Classics, the proposition that reading Greek and Latin poems ‘though’ their subsequent receptions ‘opens up fresh hermeneutical possibilities’ was once a radical challenge issued by Charles Martindale’s influential Redeeming the Text (1993). My own book is a doggedly empirical trial of this argument, since I take it that there is no better way to determine whether the (unique? distinctive?) hermeneutic possibilities advertised by reception studies are in fact worth realizing than to sound them out. The book, then, is an experiment in reading, or a series of tests, reading parts of Virgil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid through their reception in works of English literature, with chapters on the Eclogues through Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia; on the Shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8 through W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (and Iliad 18); on the figure of alternative blessings in Georgics 2.475ff. (rural piety vs philosophical transcendence) through Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’; and a range of Virgilian passages through the work of Seamus Heaney. The book’s Introduction also reads figures in a sculpture garden, ‘Little Sparta’ near Edinburgh, by the poet and visual artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Allusion is a key preoccupation, since reading texts ‘in conversation with each other’ can be described as reading allusively. But I take allusion as a figure of instability, its elements of sameness and difference always to be reconfigured and composed afresh (in each new reading, not just by each new reader). I also take the elements of alterity to be at least as revealing as those of similarity. The ‘hard question’ of reception studies is whether it can teach us anything about the earlier text that was genuinely not known already. (What is the value of reception studies in Classics?) Other questions concern how we know literary texts—that is, how we read, and the quality or qualities of our reading. (What is the value of reading?)

The Classics Seminar is open to everyone interested. Welcome!