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rediscovery, typical of the new Romantic age. Late frail mortal life and an immortal awakening - less,
eighteenth-century poets of rural life had rejected perhaps, a religious afterlife than a promise of endur-
Virgil’s pastoral as lazy and idealised: George Crabbe, ing poetic influence, much as Joseph Wright evoked
for example, had asked in The Village, in 1783, ‘From the lasting power of Virgil’s work in his moonlit paint-
Truth and Nature shall we widely stray/Where Fancy leads, ing :
or Virgil led the way?’26 But the younger poets turned
to him again. The Eclogues and Georgics can be felt Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
behindWordsworth’s contributions to the Lyrical Ballads He hath awakened from the dream of life
and some sections of the Prelude. Writing to Lord Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
Lonsdale about his Aeneid in 1824, Wordsworth said With phantoms an unprofitable strife...29
that he hoped to produce a translation that ‘should be
to a certain degree affecting, which Dryden’s is not to me The mood of Virgil’s Tomb and the conjunction of
in the least. Dr Johnson has justly remarked that Dryden ruins, nature and moonlight anticipate the tone of
had little talent for the Pathetic, and the tenderness of these British Romantic poets, and the devotion that
Virgil seems to me to escape him.Virgil’s style is an inim- ledTennyson to request that a spring of laurel from the
itable mixture of the elaborately ornate, and the majestic- tomb be placed in his grave. The painting hints at the
ally plain and touching’.27 deep, even turbulent sources of the imagination, like
Coleridge’s own image – despite his disdain forVirgil -
lll of the buried flow of creative power, running like Alph
the sacred river, ‘Through caverns measureless to man’.
O ther poets also turned toVirgil. Keats translat-
ed the Aeneid at school, not as a task but in his lll
own time, and continued after he left: his Endymion
contains many echoes of Aeneas’s quest, and of Vir- W ith regard to the Romantic movement in art,
gilian bucolic settings, the Elysian fields and the des- Virgil’s Tomb looks beyond the later stages of
cent into the Underworld. Shelley too was an admirer. Romantic Classicism – as represented by his own
In December 1818, when the Shelleys were in Naples, Corinthian Maid and Penelope – to the linking of poetic
Mary noted in her diary ‘Tuesday 15th, Read Livy –Visit and spiritual inspiration to landscapes, a transmuta-
Virgil’s Tomb & Posilippo’.28 They visited the tomb at tion of the Sublime into the scenery of feeling. The
least twice, and the spirit of Virgil hovers in the
background of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and in 26. George Crabbe, The PoeticalWorks of the Revd. George Crabbe ,
Mary’s later novels Valperga and The Last Man, which London, 1834, p. 119.
opens with the discovery of prophetic fragments in the
cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. Fittingly, Shelley’s elo- 27. William Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, 17 February 1824, quoted
quent pastoral elegy for Keats, ‘Adonais’, was based in Richard W. Clancey,Wordsworth’s Classical Undersong , Palgrave
in part on Virgil’s Tenth Eclogue in praise of Cornelius Macmillan, London, 2000, p. 60.
Gallus. Its lines movingly suggest the contrast between
28. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-44, ed. Paula R. Feldman and
Diana Scott Kilvert, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1995,Vol I p. 243.
29. ‘Adonais’, P.B. Shelley, Works ll 343-6.
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