See Gareth Reeves' _T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet_ (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1989). Reeves references much of Eliot's own writing about Virgil,
especially Eliot's book, _What is a Classic?_ and Eliot's essays, "What is
a Classic?" (1944) and "Virgil and the Christian World" (1951), both
reprinted in _On Poetry and Poets_. Eliot and the Virgil tradition through
Dante is heavily (but rather disparagingly) discussed in Duncan F.
Kennedy's "Modern receptions and their interpretive implications" in the
_Cambridge Companion to Virgil_. Kennedy cites other sources that will be
of use, such as Ziolkowski's _Vitrgil and the Moderns_ (Princeton, 1993).
See also Davie, Donald. "Virgil's Presence in Ezra Pound and Others."
Virgil in a Cultural Tradition: Essays to Celebrate the Bimillenium.
Richard A. Cardwell and Janet Hamilton, eds. University of Nottingham
Monographs in the Humanities, IV. Nottingham: University of Nottingham,
1986. I think Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams
could also be looked at from the standpoint of the Pastoral tradition and
also as poets reacting against Eliot's starkness and "cold pastoral."
Here's a chunk of a graduate seminar paper I did in 1996 on the subject of
Virgil, Eliot, Stevens and Crane + a little Williams. It explains a couple
of the sources I've listed above.
--
Early critics of Eliot recognized his associations with Virgil. W. F.
Jackson Knight's Roman Vergil, published in 1944 by Faber and Faber with
Eliot's help, was the first. Frank Kermode's review of Eliot's On Poetry
and Poets in 1958 and The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and
Change. (New York: Viking Press, 1975) made other comparisons as did Hugh
Kenner's "The Urban Apocalypse" (in Eliot in His Time: Essays on the
Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of 'The Waste Land.' A. Walton Litz,
ed. Princeton and London: Princeton University press and Oxford University
Press, 1973 33-79), yet subsequent critics who have been more removed from
Eliot and his circle have made new observations. Donald Davie writes that
"Eliot is still the massive figure that must be circumvented if we are to
see Virgil as having exerted a powerful influence on our modern poetry in
ways more partial, devious, and oblique than Eliot allowed for" (134-35).
The Eliot of Four Quartets insists that Virgil is, "above all, the author
of the Fourth Eclogue, the pagan poet who prophesied Christianity, whose
vision of human history must accordingly be seen as completed and
vindicated by the Divine Comedy" (Davie, 134-35). However, Gareth Reeves
corroborates Davie's view that Eliot's adventist "Virgilian-Dantesque
perspective," mediated as it is through Eliot's later religious, political,
and cultural designs "is in danger of making Virgil sound irrelevant as a
poetic influence, and even, in its political dimension," (Reeves, 4) "not
just useless but dangerous" (Davie, 134-35). Reeves contends
"that Eliot's later and influential view of Virgil has obscured a Virgilian
presence, not only in other poets, but in Eliot's own poetry of the first
half of his life, pre-eminently in The Waste Land. This earlier presence
represents a different version of Virgil, not moderated by Dante, not
Virgilian-Dantesque, but on the contrary, one that questions the Dantean,
Christianised version, and that reinforces The Waste Land's darkly
apocalyptic aspect in opposition to any Dantean intimations of St.
Augustine's ideal City" (7).
Reeves' formulation of Eliot's "Virgilian method," is based on Eliot's
profound historical sense manifested in his poetry as a consistent usage of
"forward or backward-looking words or phrases" (4) (Reeves borrows and
elaborates on this observation from E. J. Stormon's essay, "Virgil and the
Modern Poet," Meanjin, 6 (1947): 13-14).
Thus "Eliot's poetry mobilises at a verbal level what he heard in Virgil;
its Virgilian echoes work through language and not archetypal patterns,
even if these can be identified after the fact" (4). In this vein Eliot's
Virgilian ideal, with its acute historical awareness, had its greatest
influence on modern poetry. Specifically, Hart Crane's reaction was to
Eliot's early Virgilian pessimism while Stevens' was to the later
Christianized and adventist Virgilian-Dantesque Eliot.
At 06:51 AM 5/3/1999 -0500, David Wilson-Okamura wrote:
>Date: Sun, 2 May 1999 22:48:43 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Ozymandias <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>Since both state-sponsored poetry and national epic are essentially dead
>forms, a modern poet similar to Virgil would be difficult to find. In
>American history, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman come to mind, but neither
>really got past to "pastoral" stage of the poet's career, as modelled by
>Virgil. Both, though are considered to be national poets.
>
>If you are willing to go back to the 17th century, Milton would be an
>excellent comparison, especially since he stands as the inheri
