Neo-Latin: Two Fascinating Books
photo: Mary Sidney (1561-1621)
“There is a land of pure delight.” That is the first line of a hymnody by Isaac Watts, who published a book on Horatian lyrics in 1706. Scattered amongst the poems in his book inspired by Horace are others inspired by Pindar. But his “extravagant Pindaric verse is not the poetry on which Watt’s reputation has rested.” Rather, he is known for his hymns; my headline is taken from one of them.
But in this extraordinary book on Latin & English poetry by Victoria Moul, who I just quoted from, hymns are only one element. Moul is Associate Professor in Early Modern Latin and English at University College London. In 586 pages, she leaves no doubt about her command of the subject. This is not just a long book, but a really important one that provides a much-needed reset to so much scholarly neglect. Moul’s book is a land of pure delight.
An appreciation of Latin is all that is required to learn from the book, as she translates every passage into English, and other verses (such as the one by Watts) was only ever in English. Most people, including scholars, are not even aware of the true nature of many works inspired by Horace.
The modern perception of Horace tends to be one of a lyric poet of evanescent pleasure. Although there are traces of this in early modern English poetry, Horatian imitation is dominated by a quite different version – as above all a great moralist, both in lyric and hexameter. Though it is barely mentioned in most accounts, a large number of Horace’s odes are technically classifiable as hymns…Horace’s association with lyric address to the divine is of the utmost importance in early modernity.
As Moul notes, the hymns and panegyric lyric which were most popular in 16th and 17th-century England are the least popular today. Thus, a huge swath of English poetic culture has been largely ignored, which “helps obscure the classical roots of the ‘moralising’ lyric.” Moul devotes two chapters to the use of Horatian lyric forms as the foundation for psalm paraphrase. The most famous of these, the so-called Sidney psalter, contains 150 translations from Latin into English, using an extraordinary 171 different forms of meter! To put this in context, Moul’s appendix on Latin metres lists only the 8 most popular ones. Much of the Psalter was written by Mary Sidney (pictured here), who has been widely praised for her originality, but Moul shows this is mistaken. “The neglect of available Latin material” has obscured how much she borrowed. “I consider the Sidney psalter to be the single best and most important work of English lyric of the second half of the 16th century; but it is also, in modern terms, both unoriginal and impersonal.”
Scholars accustomed to the prevailing viewpoint will be shocked! And everyone should be shocked at how poorly so many know-it-all scholars have ignored the poetry and hymns that Moul shines a spotlight on here. Historically, these modern scholars have got it “almost exactly the wrong way round: early modern poets and readers alike prioritized scripture over the classics, and were taught to approach the classical authors via approved Protestant works composed by near contemporaries.” But this book is not just a spotlight on scholarly blindness, it is a floodlight that finally reveals the wealth of Latin poetry created in England for several centuries.
Another recent book (An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry) is an edited volume published by Bloomsbury. It approaches such poetry from a unique angle: all the poems here were written by scholars! Mostly from the 15th to 17th centuries. These are often the same scholars who wrote books about classical poetry by Horace and others. Some poets, such as Janus Dousa (1545-1604) are treated in both books. Even though he was not English (born in south Holland), he is in the Moul book because he spent considerable time in England, and wrote a Latin poem dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. As David Andrew Porter (Hunan Normal University) writes in the Bloomsbury book, “Of all the Latin satires of the early modern period, Dousa’s compositions rank among the best.” Porter offers two such satires here, the format of the book being Latin on the left, with the English translation on the right. In each case, these selections by Porter are longer (3 pages each) than is typical in the book. Each satire or poem is preceded by a relevant biographical look at the original author, along with some specific notes to prime the reader for what is to come. Detailed commentary follows every poem given here. In all, 14 people who wrote verse in Latin are studied in this book.
I will concentrate here on just two such poets, who are linked together in a chapter by Daniele Pellacani (University of Bologna): Jan Kochanowski and Hugo Grotius. They both ‘rewrote’ an ancient Greek poem about astronomy, Phaenomena, by Aratus. First, some background, which is not explicity given in the Bloomsbury book, but necessary for those approaching Aratus (who wrote in Greek) for the first time:
The earliest translation of Aratus in Rome was made by Cicero, the most important Roman orator. Cicero’s translation of Aratus was composed when he was young in ca. 90-89 BCE. Only 480 lines by Cicero (corresponding to Aratus, Phaen. 229-701) are preserved by the manuscript tradition; we also have an additional 73 lines (of which 8 are incomplete hexameters) in 34 fragments quoted by Cicero himself in his own other works (especially De natura deorum). [This paragraph is adapted from the website Early Astronomy in the University of Michigan collections]
Here, I will zero in one specific point to show the difference between their approaches to the ancient Greek poem, as transmitted to them by Cicero. Everyone is familiar with the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper constellations. Astronomers today refer to them by the Latin designations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, and Ursa is the name used by Grotius; but Kochanowski preserved the original Greek names: Helice and Cynosura. In this passage, Grotius inserts a fragment by Cicero, effectively making Cicero’s reference to seven stars as applicable to both constellations. “This solution,” writes Pellacani, “would be adopted by all later editors,” with the exception of Ewbank and herself. As she writes, this interpretation contradicts the passage, which “clearly refers to the stars of Ursa Major.” (Unfortunately, she omits W. W. Ewbank from the bibliography, but I believe it his 1933 book, The Poems of Cicero). In any case, I agree with Pellacani that the “seven” referred to just Ursa Major, which leaves all other translations faulty and thus misleading.
In conclusion, I will mention John Barclay (1582-1621), another poet who features in both books. Moul writes that Barclay and two other poets “have dropped almost completely out of English literary history,” although without them “major English literary developments – including Ben Jonson’s Epigrams of 1616; the tradition of English hymnody; and the English novel – would have developed quite differently.” Two sections of Barclay’s 1621 romance novel Argenis are given by Ruth Parkes (University of Wales) in the Bloomsbury book. She explains the masterful way he engages with the Thebiad, an epic on war written in the first century CE by Statius. “He draws on the Thebiad’s diction, material and even structure…Through the intertextuality, we can see a sophisticated and sensitive response to the Thebiad,” which is a prime example of how the poetry collected here was inspired by classical authors.
I highly recommend both books as offering unique insights into the long-forgotten poetry that has had such a major influence in shaping the English language.
A Literary History of Latin & English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England, is by Cambridge Univ. Press. It lists for $140.
An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry by Classical Scholars, is by Bloomsbury. It lists for $91.
Image: portrait of Mary Sidney in about 1590. National Portrait Gallery, London. In the public domain.