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Publica MateriesThe Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of Paradise Lost by Davis P. HardingReview by: Frederic WillArion, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1963), pp. 131-142Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162879 .

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PUBLICA MATERIES1

Frederic Will

I

HARDINGS REST POINTS FIRST. HE REMINDS US THAT QUINTILIAN was the chief bearer, to the Renaissance, of a conviction which had been so central in antiquity that it was seldom expUcit. In

literate, traditional societies?Uke those of Greece from Homer

through the fifth-century, and of pre-Christian Rome?Uterature is public property, what Horace called publica materies. As we

know, there were in antiquity no copyright laws; the greatest danger in Uterary copying was bad taste:

I only wish?Quintilian wrote?that imitators were more Ukely to improve on the good things than to exaggerate the blem ishes of the authors whom they seek to copy.

(In. Or. 10.2. 15). And there were multiple advantages to imitation.

QuintiUan?Uke many ancient critics?was convinced that the

more there is of a good thing the better. Good literary themes,

good turns of phrase, good metrical devices; all were worth

"imitating." To imitate meant simply to take the valuable where it could be found. It is sometimes hard for us to realize how close to "modern times" this attitude can be found. In the EngUsh speaking world, for example, there is only a very gradual break down of the old conception in literary theory. Still, in the time of Ben Johnson, literary theorists gave overwhelming support to the classical doctrine of imitation. Harding shows that Milton im

pUcitly accepted the whole view. It is equally clear that to analyze the breakdown of the doctrine is to write the history of the Ro

mantic Movement. Such a short distance are we, today, over the

brink into a new literary world.

Of course "our" Uterary world is not really new. Without speak

ing of the first creators, who must have invented ex nihilo, or even of the Greeks and Romans, who were

bursting with inventio, we

can say that the florid EngUsh Renaissance was never quite properly servile to the great models. It can in this be contrasted to the Italian Renaissance, in which devotion to Vergil and

Cicero, by stipulated AristoteUan rites, often amounted to idolatry. Among the EngUsh, gradual Uberation from Aristotle, and Uberal ization of the meaning of imitatio, had to wait for growing self confidence. By the seventeenth century, as we see from Harding, imitation meant

something more like "close creative

reworking" than like "copying."

1 The Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of Para dise Lost. By Davis P. Harding, University of IlUnois Press. 1962. 137

pp. $3.00.



132 PUBLICA MATERIES

At that time there was an extension of the notion of imitation; this extension, too, being authorized by ancient critics. Isocrates

had challenged his rivals to "center their rivalry" on his topics, and to "study how they may surpass (him) in speaking on the same question." (Panegyric, 8, 188). Phaedrus claimed to have

"polished" and "brought to perfection" the work of Aesop, not in

"envy, but (in) emulation." (Fables, I, prologue). Longinus said that Plato would never have written as he did "had he not striven

with heart and soul to contest the prize with Homer." (On the

Sublime, XIII, 4). PUny the Elder wrote that "posterity will con tend with me, as I have done with my predecessors." (Nat. Hist.,

Dedication, I, 7). EngUsh Renaissance criticism is larded with

repetitions of the theme: aemulatio is there to supplement imi tatio.

That Milton could and did imitate requires no argument; Harding goes far, too far, in arguing the point; but at least he makes the point firmly, and that helps. He is even more helpful on the point of Milton's competition with his classical predeces sors. We know that Milton was a born disputer. He excelled in the lethal "appositions" which were a favorite pastime of "Poules

Pigeons," the students of St. Paul's School. To appose was "to

dispute scholler-Uke in Latine, of any good Grammar question . . ," a sort of high-school casuistry, in a foreign language, which

deUghted the later defender of paradox; the genius of the "Fortunate Fall." Paradise Lost in full of impUed competitions.

In one place (P.L., IX, 11.13-16) the spirit rises expUcitly into statement. Milton admits that to portray the FaU of Adam is a "sad task"

.. . yet argument

Not less but more Heroic than the wrath Of stern Achilles or his Foe pursu'd Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall...

But in the exordium, on which Harding concentrates, there is an

impUcit running disputation with Homer and Vergil. (It runs

through much of the epic: Harding only brushes the surface). Milton writes, for instance, of a disobedience which brought "all our woe" into the world, not just the woe of a wandering hero and his men, or of Troy. He writes of "one greater Man," who

will "restore us," and he impUes that such a man is "greater than

Achilles, Odysseus, or Aeneas." Or he proposes to "soar/ Above the Aonian Mount," above the home of the Muses. The complexity of such impUcations is part of that cultured dialogue which

Harding wants us to hear in almost every Une of Paradise Lost.

Harding hears the larger dialogue too. Milton proposes a time

span (Fall to Atonement) which parallels but dwarfs Vergil's span (Fall of Troy to EstabUshment of Rome). Milton too com

prehends Hell, Heaven, and Earth, but with a (desired) pro fundity greater than Vergil's. Milton's highest aspirations are



Frederic Will 133

aspirations to surpass. Imitatio is in him forever turning over into aemulatio.

II

When it comes down more closely

to cases, to the texture of

Milton's operation on classical Uterature, an

extremely difficult

question is raised: how closely does Milton's work pick up and echo that Uterature? Harding knows the difficulty:

Where the work of an imitative poet is concerned, the prob lem (of determining sources) is obviously going to be more

acute; and the better the poet the more acute the problem is. This is why Paradise Lost is, in this respect at least, the most

frustrating poem in the language. No other poem is so full of

ghost influences, influences instinctively felt to be present but which resist to the bitter end the tags which scholars would dearly love to attach to them. The assimilative genius of the poet has intervened, and confronted with at best only faint and tantaUzing echoes, the critic is reduced to con

jecture or to an honorable silence. And as if this were not

enough, there is a further complication. We have no right to assume that what today appears as a

ghost influence was

necessarily one at the time Paradise Lost was written, (pp.

89-90). '

Harding has grasped his own problem. He sees into his own unsureness about finding Milton's sources. I'm afraid he doesn't

realize, though, how many ghost-chases he has led us. We shall run three chases with Harding. At the panting close

there will be little doubt of his failure as hunter. The first chase leads through a mad analysis of Milton's Fiph

Elegy, a Latin poem of 140 Unes written in its author's twentieth

year. Harding appUes himself to a select fifteen Unes; in them sensuous earth (Tellus lasciva) begs Apollo to rest in her, rather than in the sea, his caerula mater. Before we know it, the lines

have been confidently parcelled out to their sources. I note two

examples. Milton writes:

Cur te, inquit, cursu languentem Phoebe diurno

Hesperus recipit Caerula mater aquis? Quid tibi cum Tethy? Quid cum Tartesside lympha,

Dia quid immundo perluis ora salo?

(11.81-84). The first impression is clear: Milton here assumes a general rhetorical attitude, expressed by questions, colored by a famiUar

physical imagery. We don't mind, especially if we know some

thing of the poet's education, being told that the pervasive influence (in this poem), far and away, is that of Ovid, who in diverse places had much to say on the sub




ject of the Sun-god, Phoebus, (p. 12). It is probably worthwhile comparing Milton's Unes with Phoebus'

words to Phaethon:

tune etiam quae me subiectis excipit undis,

ne ferar in praecepts, Tethys solet ipsa vereri...

(Met. IL, 11.68-69.) But it is maddening to be informed, after the quoting of this last

passage:

Here, then, we have the genesis of the first two and a half Unes of the passage from Milton: subiectis excipit undis becomes Hesperiis recipit

. . . oquis, perhaps

under the

additional influence of a Une from the Fourth Book of the

Metamorphoses (line 214), where the Sun is again associated with the epithet "Hesperian":

Axe sub Hesperio sunt pascua SoUs equorum:

or, more Ukely still, of a verse from Ovid's Fasti (2.73): Proximus Hesperias

Titan abiturus in undas ...

(pp. 12-13). We gasp at such certainty, and reach confusedly to the "perhaps"

and "more likely still" in Harding's analysis. Anything that wiU make Miltonic creation seem less Uke that of an IBM machine. Or which will, at the very least, make Milton seem a more adroit hider of his tracks. We are at the same time baffled for a

motive of such source-hunting; even if it is essentiaUy "accurate" it ignores the one

point of interest, why Milton chose this rather

than that source Une, and what he did to the Unes he chose. This is only the beginning.

Now a second example, from the analysis of the Fiph Elegy; a question sUghtly less verbal, and considerably more subtle, than the previous. Tellus expostulates:

Nee me (crede mihi) terrent Semelaia fata, Nee Phaetonteo fumidus axis equo; (11. 91-92).

I have no quarrel with putting this distich beside Ovid's nil iUo fertur volucmm moderator equoram post Phaetonteos vidisse dolentius ignes.

(Met., IV, 11.245-246). The adjective built on "Phaethon" is rare and "no poet except Ovid had associated it directly with the idea of burning." (p. 15). But what follows I accuse of an appalling and unUterary over

subtlety. The two Unes from Ovid come near the end of a story which relates how the jealousy of Clytie resulted in the death of

Leucothoe, slain by her irate father. Both were rivals for the love of Phoebus and both were goddesses of the sea. The

newly introduced myth has an obvious relevance to the substance of the Unes from the Fiph Elegy, and the purpose of the verbal echo stands revealed, (p. 15).

I shall soon admit, at some length, the astounding thoroughness



Frederic Will 135

of a seventeenth century classical education. Milton's "fit au

dience" was not ours. But I gravely doubt that it would, in reading poetry, have picked up such resonances as the armchair scholar,

Harding, hears in "Phaetonteos."

The second chase takes us through similar brush, but enables us to see, as we could not above, Harding explaining how and

why Milton combined original passages into his own work. The text is Paradise Lost:

... Adam, soon as he heard

The fatal Trespass don by Eve, amaz'd, Astonied stood and Blank, while horror chill Ran through his veins, and all his joynts relax'd;

(IX, 11,888-891). We feel the need?I wonder why?to find the ancient source.

(Did Milton always create in terms of sources?) Fortunately we find two passages in Vergil which, in combination, will give us

Milton. First there is Turnus: ast illi solvuntur frigore membra

vitaque cum gemitu fugit indign?t a sub umbras.

(Aen. XII, 11. 951-952). Then there is Sinon, teUing the Trojans of the Greek's terror:

obtipuere animi geUdusque per ima cucurrit ossa tremor...

(Aen., II, 11. 121-122). Turnus plus Sinon makes "Adam astonied":

By amalgamating phrases from each passage, Milton pools, as it were, all their relevant impUcatioris and brings them to bear

upon the situation in his own poem. (p. 96). We may need to go to antiquity for the passage in Milton. We

may possibly need to go to Vergil and to more than one passage in him. But it is pure academic nybris to intrude farther than this.

Milton, like God, has his secrets; and they had better be left alone.

Harding's knock on the door won't even be heard. Not even when he tries the side door. The third chase, which

might be called source-hunting by the buck-shot method, wants the origins of the frightful Satanic dream which, in book five of

Paradise Lost, assails Eve with "Phantasms and Dreams" of ter

rible loss. There is such uncertainty about these sources that we wander from one to another of three possibilities. There is the

appearance of Allecto to Tumus (Aen., VII, 11.406ff.), after which Turnus will make his disastrous decision to break the peace treaties; there is Medea's dream, in the Argonautica, that she will follow Jason away from her home, and into tragedy; and there is

Dido's dream (Aen. IV, 11. 464-468) that she will wander lonely and alone, driven by Aeneas. All we (or Harding) can say, by

way of considering these as sources, is that they are all dreams, and that each, at some

point, touches Eve's dream; that common

point is the subUminal conviction of approaching disaster. But




this point is too general to be of interest in any work short of a treatise on the function of dream in ancient Uterature. Harding himself admits it:

My main idea in presenting these dream analogues from classical Uterature is not to show Milton's specific indebted ness to them but to allow the reader to see for himself how

Milton has revitaUzed an old convention and built it soUdly and impressively into the structure of his poem. (p. 84).

But he stops short of the natural conclusion: that if we are not interested in "Milton's specific indebtedness" we are not interested

in anything, or perhaps in everything. Above all, Harding the hunter lacks method. He fluctuates between minute, super confident discovery of sources, and vague indications of them.

Milton's soul flies out between the grasping hands.

Ill The trouble, here, is a psychologically understandable over

zealousness, and it will advance justice and clarity to be quite frank on the matter. Harding has a mediocre understanding of how poems get made, and a poor use of the classics; he feels unsure of himself; and he overcompensates by ascribing to Milton a preternatural and pedantic preoccupation with his classical sources.

What I have already said briefly but representatively suggests the results of this compensatory technique.

I attended to the cen

tral activity of the book, source-hunting. I could have been far more

expUcit about weaknesses. There was room to point out

Harding's ignorance of Greek: which leads him to a weird state ment about the word "anthropos" which Homer "used ... in the

opening verses of the Odyssey" (p. 27); which makes him give birth to that non-existent Greek word impios, "which the latter

(Homer) used whenever he wished to express his scorn of a character ..." (p. 99) ; which leads him to treat muri and alge, from Iliad, I, line 2, as complete?unapostrophied?words (p. 35) ; and which, worst of aU, induces him to stick with the long defunct

Lang, Leaf, and Myers translation of Homer, interposing it at several points between Milton and the spirit of antiquity, the

vitality of which is the central premise of the book. It is un believable that Odysseus should still, in 1962, be "hard bestead in war . . ."2

There was room, that is, to dig into the deeper strata of

Harding's problem; into his weakness with Greek and with his

2 Reading this madness (as I did) in a wildly mis-formatted copy of

the book contributed greatiy to the gay mood. How did the University of Illinois Press contrive a volume in which p. 78 is printed from the

very top, while the print of the facing p. 79 starts three inches lower;

or, more teUingly, in which the print of p. 75 starts an inch and a

half higher on the page than does that of p. 74, which is its reverse

side? It is Uke reading on ship, in high sea.



Frederic W?l 137

own language, which he hefts struggUngly, and labors under. In the midst of it all, however, we find ourselves besieged by charity.

Or is it fear for our own souls? In the thoroughness of his training Milton was preparing him

self for a close textured relationship, to classical antiquity, which it is very difficult for us even to imagine. It is in fact Uttle wonder that the matured classical Uterary work of such a man is and should be hard for us to assess or understand. Harding, with his

only fair contemporary appreciation of classical language and

poetry, goes astray in his hunt for specific sources. How could he have had an accurate perspective onto the matter? That he goes badly astray in these details is of course entirely his own fault. He misunderstands the poetic process, treating it alternately as mechanical or vague. And he greatly exaggerates the kind of classical awareness which a modern audience, even in the seven

teenth century, could have brought to bear on the reading of an allusive poem. He is, as I have said, overcompensating for his

specific weaknesses. But that Harding is perplexed, in taking up the question of Milton's classical sources, is forgivable and not

surprising. He, Uke us all, is on the other side of the divide. The possibility of Milton's practice lay in his classical educa

tion. He entered St. Paul's in 1615, if not a few years later, and

Cambridge in 1625. Before even the former matriculation, that is before he was seven (or eight, or nine) years old he had been

given some classical education.

We don't know whether or not he had a formal petty-school training, but he had at least the equivalent. He learned to use his

hornbook, first mastering syUables, then the principle of sentences; then extending these basic responses to a first foreign language

by copying out identical passages of scripture?Pater Noster and Lord's Prayer?in both Latin and EngUsh. He was verbally dis

cipUned, at the least, by the time he became one of "Poules

Pigeons." Then he entered a

system centered on grammar, in the widest

sense of the term. Erasmus' De Ratione Studii, which already in 1527 had been adapted and introduced at St. Paul's, had aided the rise of grammar, to the exclusion of the two other members

of the trivium, logic and rhetoric. Erasmus pushed for a close and

quick relation of accidence and syntax to the study of great authors, and his insistence was to mark EngUsh grammar school

training far into the nineteenth century. It related the technical means of grammatical study to its most civiUzed ends.

Milton slaved joyously in this system, spending his mornings on accidence, his afternoons on authors; at least during the first four forms. We know pretty well what he was reading and how he was treating it. At the beginning he used Lily's grammar, applying it directly to moral pieces from Cato, to Lily's Carmen de Moribus, and to such anthologies as Phrases Oratoriae et Poeticae. But soon, before he was ten, he was

beginning to com



I38 PUBLICA MATERIES

pose in Latin. At first he did so by the double translation method. He would, say, turn a Latin prose epistle into EngUsh, then turn it back into Latin, to compare results. Or he would do the same

with Greek: The young Milton learned Greek as he learned other lan

guages; specifically, he took his grammar to the Gospel of

John in Greek, construed it, translated it, retranslated his Latin into EngUsh, took the EngUsh and translated it back into Latin, the Latin back into Greek, and finally he com

pared his Greek with the text from which he had started.

(Fletcher, Intellectual Development of lohn Milton, I, p. 254).

And it cannot have been very long, perhaps three or four years, before he began freely to compose early forms of those Latin and Greek poems which we admire as poetry, not as schoolboy exercises.

By the age of sixteen, when he was ready for Cambridge, Milton had come far. He had done a good deal of original composition: had written at least nearly final forms, say, of the fine "Apologus de Rusticus et Hero," which he held back until 1673, and of the 114th Psalm in Greek translation. He had read Hesiod, Pindar, and Euripides, and presumably knew them well. In Latin he had read much more widely. He had read some of every major Latin

author, with special stress on Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, and Horace, and could submit their texts to the most adroit gymnastics of

analysis. He was quite ready to speak

ex tempore, in Latin, on

any of these texts.

He went on to Cambridge, in 1625, to develop these skills by steady

use. By then Latin was his second mother tongue. In it

he wrote, as an extracurricular activity, the fine Fourth Elegy, for

Thomas Young; a work which, to stick with a single example, draws on a wider variety of classical mythology,

names from

it, and relations between mythological characters, than (that of) any ancient poet...

(Fletcher, ID}M, II, p. 129). By the age of twenty there were many other serious compositions in Latin. That Milton's Greek was a ready tool we see in several

ways: from his sheepish admission that he had not found time to write Greek verses at Cambridge; or from his bewildering college text of Pindar, which is cross-referenced and marginally annotated

with a range Uke that of Wilamowitz and a far greater finesse.

By the age of twenty-five Milton was a consummate classicist.

IV

The fallen education of our day dulls us; we can hardly under stand the close relation of the classical tradition to earUer writers.

We are hard put to understand those eorUer sensibilities: to grasp,



Frederic WM 139

in Milton's case, his receptivities, impUcations, and expectations from his audience. We have our

compensations, of course. We

tend presently to maintain the literary classical tradition with

what, to a friendly judge, might seem great power and originaUty. I think, here, of certain works by Joyce, Gide, Sartre, Rilke, EUot and Kazantzakis and of their collective efforts to re-experience classical themes in meaningfully contemporary ways. Certainly those writers have approached classical themes, thus in a sense classical Uterature, with high seriousness. They have measured out their own inner arguments

in terms of those themes. This we

admire. But none of them writes in close dialogue with an ancient text or texts. None of them writes in a closely allusive way. I doubt that any of them could have done so and I am certain that it wouldn't have done any of them any good. We are not ready either to appreciate or judge that kind of creativity.

There is Uttle in our verbal training and activity that gives promise of restoring even part of the older perspective and pos sibilities. We can still measure our distance by the height of our

pile of reference books, when we read Milton. But for our time there are at least certain instructive examples.

I want just

a word

on those now. It will bring my argument full circle. We are Uving in the center of a translation-revolution; the

rumors of battle strike every civilized ear. Competent poets are

leading the revolution; competent critics are struggUng to assess it. In the process our own version of aemulotio is coming

to birth.

There is a sharp line of distinction between this and Milton's aemulatio. Where the latter carried on what we have seen, a close

dialogue with the texture of classical Uterature, and that with a wide range for allusion, even the best of our contemporary trans

lators begin from a position much farther from the ancient word

world. They move in, though, from positions of creative maturity.

We have recently seen a number of good translations from the

classics, and we have become properly demanding, not only of

minimal fideUty to the spirit of the ancient text, but of fideUty-as

it-turns-into-personal-style, and in some cases even of power-to recreate in terms of the ancient text.

The passion to write 'what oft was said but ne'er so well ex

pressed' begins with the translation personally turned. I suggest that works like Lattimore's Iliad and C. Day Lewis' Aeneid fits this

description; here we read good EngUsh poetry, picking up the sound and connotations of its original, accounting for the spirit of its original with a nice balance of contemporaneity and scholar

ship. I would not want to include these among the major transla tions, even of our time. I would not call them aemulatio, in the

sense either of Milton's Latin Elegies or of Paradise Lost. But they wrestle honestly with the problem of obUque correspondences, and show none of that timidity before greatness which has often been the translator's death.




At a higher level of translative recreativity there is by now a small but treasured company of works. One wiU be more daring and more

personal than another, one more "scholarly." But all,

without in any way inviting comparison with the "great encounter" in Ulysses or The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, work contempo raneously and powerfully

out from an ancient text. Their authors

might all have subscribed to what Dudley Fitts wrote, in intro

ducing his Poems from the Greek Anthology: ... I have not

really undertaken translation at all?transla

tion, that is to say, as it is understood in the schools. I have

simply tried to restate in my own idiom what the Greek verses have meant to me ... In general, my purpose has

been to compose first of all, and as simply as possible, an

English poem. Doing this to Homer has of course been a popular sport. Robert

Lowell, attempting what he, along with Johnson ( The Vanity of Human Wishes) and Pope (Iliad) calls "imitation"?an act closer

to aemulatio than to imitatio?oSers a couple of handsome speci

mens from Homer. (Imitations, pp. 1-2). The first opens: Sing for me, Muse, the mania of Achilles that cast a thousand sorrows on the Greeks and threw so many huge souls into hell.. .

Blank verse working muscularly against the pattern of ordinary conversation, keeping itself fresh with a mixture of iambs, ana

pests, and dactyls. Lines rising to a point of excitement in words

Uke "mania" or "hell," which rape their Homeric models, seeding them with a strange new Ufe which has been borrowed from the life of our own EngUsh. Lowell gives us only a couple of pages, but we see Homer boldly met at several turns: in

the sword bit through his neck and collar bone and flashed blue sky ...

or in but the dark shadows of the fish will shiver,

lunging to snap Lykaon's silver fat. It is all there in the Greek, half-said, half simply prepared. Lowell

makes us want to read him, himself, as well as Homer again. He

has composed an EngUsh poem. Christopher Logue has gone farther. The question will be asked

why he, who by any account is a good lyric poet, should turn to Homer at all. What draws him to translate? If he is wilUng to

"depart so far" from his originals as in the selections from Book

XIX, found in this issue of Arion, what is he getting from Homer, or giving to us from Homer?

I hope that these questions will by now sound outdated, and that at least a readiness for Logue's kind of audacity will await

him. He takes the terrible risks necessary to re-encounter his orig

inal; he invents his own disorderly music, his own set of anachron istic references, his own

system of excisions; and he comes out

holding Homer in his arms. With



Frederic Will 141

... Achilles. Looked, Lifted a piece of it (his armor) between his hands; Tested the weight of it, then, spun The holy tungsten Uke a star between his knees,

SUtting his eyes against the flare, some thought. But others thought the hatred behind his Uds Made him protect the metal.

His eyes Uke furnace doors ajar. Or with:

A soldier pisses against a chariot wheel, yawning; His mate sweetens an ax-blade on a soapy stone,

Shaves his forearm with it while, between the dunes Come twelve white horses led by seven women, Briseis in their midst, her breasts So lovely they envy one another.

Ezra Pound, for a last example. His Homage to Sextus Proper tius, first published in 1934, has become a landmark.3 Pound was a scapegoat, who in that work went forth into the nervous armies of the classicists, and Uved to tell of their charges of inaccuracy, irresponsibiUty, and immoraUty. His passionate, whimsical, sophis ticated, agonized poem picks up the elegies of Propertius at many

points. In both verbal detail and general attitude he is eager to make his own point with whatever help the Propertian text offers. He descends into the intimate operations of the original, in many places matching his metrical organization with the Latin distichs, or distributing his thought comparably. But there is always the difference that counts: the pun that acidifies, or the misreading that piques into new understandings. At the level of ornament Pound plays and shapes:

Io mooed the first years with averted head, And now drinks Nile water Uke a god,

Ino in her young days fled pell mell out of Thebes, Andromeda was offered to a

sea-serpent and respectably married to Perseus .. .

While Propertius' substance?his beautiful and bitter eros, and his scorn for the "grand" and "pompous"?are preserved and power

fully modified by Pound. Scom for the pubUc, and for its grand phrases, is now

sharper, more

raging. Love has become a harsher

and more dangerous encounter. I barely suggest the obliquity and recreative power of Pound's work.

It is not for an instant my thought that the makers of the trans lation-revolution "emulate" in Milton's way. The difference could be easily imagined from the modems' curricula vitarum. Logue

3 I owe my interest and much of my awareness of this poem to

John SulUvan. He has discussed the poem in an essay on Pound and

Propertius, which wiU appear this spring in a volume entitled Hereditas,

published by The University of Texas Press; and at greater length in a

forthcoming volume on Pound's Homage and its relation to Propertius.




is almost ignorant of Greek. Pound is a brilUant dabbler in lan

guages, one who carries it off with such aplomb that it is often hard to know how much he knows. Lowell is a highly educated

contemporary, with wide tastes and quick Sprachgef?hl. And so on, through the majority. My money says that even Lattimore, a

professional classicist, began his classics ten years later than

Milton.

Accordingly these moderns emulate in their own way. There

is in them little (though in Pound some) of the close effort to

counterpoint new

meanings against the details of ancient syntax. An easy and continuous expenditure of that effort requires child

hood famiUarity with Greek or Latin. And there is little extended

dialogue, as in Paradise Lost, with the impUcations of major clas

sical works. There is rather a much more short-term sparring with

ancient texts. (Neither Pound, Logue, nor Lowell has managed

anything long in this vein). What we find is courage, lyric bril liance, and substantial using of ancient literature. This is all very

much to the good, and closely parallel, in its humanity and Uterary commitment, to Milton's encounter with antiquity.

The real point here after all is that we have constructed for ourselves, in the last three decades of working with EngUsh, a

corpus of emulative translations in which we can trace efforts at

least distantly akin to Milton's. Like Harding we are all still on the other side of the divide. But there is no longer any excuse for remaining there, as he does, with a sense of absolute aUena

tion. We will never get back to Milton's standpoint. But we are

perhaps about to find one of our own from which to regard him

(almost) fact-to-face.



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