Virgil's Aeneid (modern Critical Interpretations)

Virgil's Aeneid Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University © 1987 1 ISBN 0877549192 Contents Editor's Note / vii Introduction / 1 HAROLD BLOOM Aeneas / 9 VIKTOR POSCHL Virgil's Style / 31 THOMAS GREENE The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid / 57 ADAM PARRY Depths and Surfaces / 75 W. R. JOHNSON The Dido Episode /103 BARBARA J. BONO War and Peace /127 K. W. GRANSDEN Chronology /149 Contributors / 151 Bibliography /153 Acknowledgments /155 Index / 157 Editor's Note This book brings together a representative selection of the most useful criticism available of Virgil's Aeneid. The critical essays are arranged here in the chronological order of their original publication. I am grateful to Marena Fisher for her aid in editing this volume. My introduction meditates upon Virgil's poetic originality, which I see as centered in his peculiar gift of negative imagination. The chronological sequence begins with Viktor Poschl, who sees the hero Aeneas "as a man of memory and of inner vision." Thomas Greene, studying Virgil's style, emphasizes "the moral ambivalence which personality entails" throughout the Aeneid. Greene's insights are cognate with Adam Parry's distinction between the poem's two dominant voices, Augustan and elegiac. W R. Johnson, whose Darkness Visible may be the best critical study of Virgil, studies the contrast between the poem's surfaces, which shine with bright images of illusion, and its depths, which figure the terrible reality of the will of Juno. In an exegesis of the Dido episode, Barbara J. Bono sees it as exposing an intensity of longing for a spiritual vision more comforting than any Virgil could hope to know. In this book's final essay, K. W Gransden insists that "for Virgil all war is mad and one cannot conduct oneself morally on the battlefield." Gransden, like Johnson and Bono, takes us back full circle to this book's introduction, itself heavily influenced by Johnson, and to our contemporary view of Virgil as an ancestor of our nightmare discontents, our nostalgias, and our fitful hopes for what yet might be. Introduction When Aeneas is sent by Virgil to the shades, he meets Dido the Queen of Carthage, whom his perfidy had hurried to the grave; he accosts her with tenderness and excuses; but the lady turns away like Ajax in mute disdain. She turns away like Ajax, but she resembles him in none of those qualities which give either dignity or propriety to silence. She might, without any departure from the tenour of her conduct, have burst out like other injured women into clamour, reproach, and denunciation; but Virgil had his imagination full of Ajax, and therefore could not prevail on himself to teach Dido any other mode of resentment. —DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Rambler, no. 121 I To be employed as the key instance of "the dangers of imitation" by the greatest Western literary critic is the saddest of all Virgil's melancholy-ridden posthumous vicissitudes. It is unhappy enough that the excessively noble Aeneas should be considered by many readers to be a prig, a Trojan version of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, as it were. But to read Virgil while keeping Homer too steadily in mind is clearly to impose upon the strongest Latin poet a burden that only a few Western writers could sustain. Virgil is not Dante or Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Joyce. He has his affinities with Tennyson, and with other poets in the elegiac mode, down to Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, both of whom celebrated Virgil as a beautiful "inadequacy" (Arnold) and a mature "poet of unique destiny" (Eliot), two apparently antithetical judgments that actually say much the same thing, which is not much. Like Arnold and Eliot, po