In 1917 Wilfred Owen denounced the ‘‘old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori'' (a sweet and seemly thing it is, to die for one's country, Horace Odes 3.2.13); the slaughter of a generation of the educated class in the trenches during the Great War cast into radical doubt the value of the classical literature that had served as the basis for their education. Pound found within Latin literature itself a means to attack the bloated poetic and political inheritance of his age (on Pound’s involvement with the poetry of classical Rome during World War I, see Davidson 1995; on Pound and Vergil, see Davie 1986). The goal of his Homage to Sextus Propertius was to present ‘‘certain emotions as vital to me in 1917, faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire, as they were to Propertius some centuries earlier, when faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire’’ (Pound 1971: 231). The analogy between the British and Roman Empires - and between what Pound understood as Propertius' relation to Horace and Vergil on the one hand and the modernist relation to the English poetic tradition on the other - provided the ground for rethinking and relaunching the literary mode of imitation. The poem consists of translations, adaptations, and mistranslations of passages from Propertius' later elegies, designed in various ways to create an atmosphere of life confined within a deathly stasis (the deliberate ‘‘howlers,’’ for example, mock the deadening pedantry of scholars). The Homage traces the dramatic situation of a Propertius who struggles to find words for life and love at a time when the available language comprises the deceptions of public life, the cliches and self-deceptions of romantic attachment, and a discredited poetic tradition (Sullivan 1964; Bush 1983).
After World War I and with the rise of fascism, Vergil began to be read in a new and more darkly political way (Ziolkowski 1993). From 1936 to 1945, a period that saw his detention in Nazi custody as well as his emigration to the United States, Hermann Broch worked on The Death of Virgil, a long prose fiction recreating the last 18 hours of Vergil’s life. Broch had only rudimentary Latin, and before this project he had shown little interest in Vergil or Rome. The initial impetus for the book came from reading Theodor Haecker’s Virgil, Father of the West (1931), a study that drew parallels between Vergil’s age and contemporary Europe and, continuing a tradition of reading Vergil as an anima naturaliter Christiana (a spirit Christian by nature), emphasized the presence of love in his works (Haecker’s work also had a significant influence on T. S. Eliot; see Reeves 1989: 96-116). With further details from Donatus’ life of Vergil, which a friend translated for him, Broch examines Vergil’s intention to destroy the Aeneid. Art is autonomous, and no duty can be imposed on it (Broch 1983: 334); therefore, the artist’s devotion to his art necessarily withdraws him from the domains of politics and even from ‘‘the round of human action and the human need for help’’ (Broch 1983: 225). As history changes, this withdrawal may cease to be justified. In the third section of the book, Augustus and Vergil argue, with increasing anger, about Vergil’s intended sacrifice. Vergil at last relents, and although this is not explained, it is clear ‘‘by renouncing his wish, he is able to commit an act of human love, thus anticipating in his own way the kingdom of love and spirit which is to come’’ (Ziolkowski 1993: 205).
From 1938 to 1944, Miklbs Radnbti wrote eight eclogues7 that are commonly considered one of the great achievements of modern Hungarian poetry. The initial impetus for these was a commission to translate Vergil’s Eclogue 9 in 1938. He was attracted not only to the Vergilian themes of dispossession, exile, and the poet’s task, but also to formal aspects of classicism, such as writing in hexameters (all but two of his eclogues are written in dactylic hexameter). The formal and thematic concerns form a unity. In the seventh eclogue, written during his imprisonment in a labor camp in Yugoslavia, he asks:
- O home, O can it still be?
With the bombing? And is it as then when they marched us away?
And shall those who moan on my left and my right return?
Say, is there a country where someone still knows the hexameter?
(Ozsvath 2000: 205)
The hexameter is a synecdoche for civilized life, which was ended by the labor camps and continued to exist only in memory and in the formal, metrical commitment to Vergil and to the Hungarian hexameter tradition (George 1986: 433). The eighth eclogue, written a few months before his murder in a forced march, combines the classical and the biblical pastoral modes, and fury sustains both the prophet Nahum and the poet who bears witness to the torched cites of Europe (Gefin 1999; Adams 1965).
The modernist reception of Ovid was broad but often indirect, inseparable from the encounter with myth (for a survey see Ziolkowski 2005); from this perspective a critic may have been justified in claiming Ovid as a ‘‘chief ancestor of literary modernism’’ (Tomlinson 2003: 101). For Pound, Ovid’s Metamorphoses was ‘‘a sacred book; one of the cornerstones of his creating imagination’’ (Davidson 1995: 116; see also Feder 1985). Eliot’s Waste Land responds as much to Ovid as to Vergil (see Medcalf 1988; Reeves 1989: 28-58; Martindale 1995-6; Tomlinson 2003: 121-41). Picasso’s illustrations of the Metamorphoses were an unusually close response to the text. In a short period, he produced 30 etchings to a selection of myths made by Albert Skira. For Picasso, the linear style of the illustrations was a means to unite modern and ancient styles. He admired ancient art, especially fifth-century vase painting, and as he believed that line drawing alone was intrinsically abstract, it was also modern (Cowling 2002: 543). He made full use of the nonrepresentational ‘‘overlappings, foreshortenings, and other uncertainties’’ (Florman 2000: 34) of the illustrations.
Other Latin writers had a narrower impact, significant in more isolated cases, as with Seneca and T. S. Eliot, or with Petronius and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925) or Cocteau (The School of Widows, 1936). One of the fullest engagements with imperial Rome was Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), an historical novel she began in 1924, abandoned, and took up again in 1948, in a period of relative optimism, after war had ended and the United Nations was founded. The novel is written in the form of a monologue and a political testament, in which Hadrian is depicted as a wise sensualist and citizen whose flexibility, openmindedness toward other cultures, and large scope of thoughtful action ensured a limited peace until drawn into war in Palestine (see Yourcenar 1980: 113-29).
Yourcenar was unusual in the degree to which she was immersed in classics and classical languages. The lack of direct access to classics was more common, and it sometimes - as with the exemplary instances of Broch, Joyce, and Mandelstam - seems to have acted as a positive incitement to engage classical texts in new ways.
FURTHER READING
Every important modernist figure has been the subject of more criticism and scholarship than can be surveyed. Of the thousands of scholarly and critical works on James Joyce, for example, there are hundreds devoted to various aspects of his relation to classics. Yet for all this volume, no reasonably comprehensive survey of the classical tradition and modernism has been attempted, and the broad shape and scope of the modernists’ engagement with the classics remain unknown. An additional stumbling-block is that in many cases we lack the fundamental scholarship necessary for critical inquiry, including, for example, scholarly editions of most of the major works of Eliot and Pound, or the publication of many of their letters. Most often the useful secondary literature has examined more focused subjects. In two studies, Ziolkowski investigates modernists in their relation to Vergil (1993) and Ovid (2005), both in detail and with a wide perspective. In an earlier generation, critics investigated the reception of individual classical themes or figures and usually covered the modern period, at least to some degree (see for example Stanford 1964 on Ulysses, or Strauss 1971 on Orpheus).
NOTES
1 Of the competing accounts of modernism, a narrow definition of the term might limit it largely to works of 1910-40; a more expansive definition might place its origin in France in the last third of the nineteenth century, or in Britain or Germany of the 1890s. This chapter has adopted the chronological limits of the first half of the twentieth century as its working basis.
2 With details from Frazer, as noted by Carne-Ross 1979: 209-10.
3 Stephen Phillips published his verse drama Ulysses in 1902; D’Annunzio’s long poem Maia (1903), a chronicle of his journey to Greece, imagines contemporary encounters with ancient characters, including Ulysses.
4 It is not known for certain which kouros served as Rilke’s model, although several possibilities have been discussed.
5 The deficiencies of Heidegger’s account as an historically plausible interpretation of Plato are discussed in Friedlander 1958: 221-9.
6 Ovid was a ‘‘lifelong favorite of Mandelstam’s who may have felt that his fate in Soviet Russia was that of Ovid in exile’’ (Terras 1966: 259); see also Ziolkowski 2005: 67-73.
7 It is not known for certain which of his poems corresponds to the sixth eclogue.
A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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