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The Latin Poetry of English Poets Routledge Revivals The Latin Poetry of English Poets Thomas Campion, Milton, Crashaw, Herbert, Bourne, Walter Savage Landor — all these poets, between them spanning the period from the Elizabethan to the Victorian age, wrote a substantial body of Latin verse in addition to their better-known English poetry, representing part of the vast and almost unexplored body of Neo-Latin literature which appealed to an international reading public throughout Europe. The Latin poetry of these English poets is of particular interest when it is set against the background of their writings in their own tongue: this collection examines the extent to which our judgment of a poet is altered by an awareness of his Latin works. In some we find prefigured themes which were later treated in their English verse; others wrote Latin poetry throughout their lives and give evidence in their Latin poetry of interests which do not find expression in their English com­ positions. This volume is a valuable resource for students of both Latin and English literature. Page Intentionally Left Blank The Latin Poetry of English Poets Edited by J.W. Binns First published in 1974 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd This edition first published in 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1974 J.W. Binns The right of J.W . Binns to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. P u b lish er’s N ote The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. D isclaim er The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 73093635 ISBN 13: 978-0-415-74021-0 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-315-81574-9 (ebk) The Latin Poetry of English Poets Edited by J. W. Binns Routledge & Kegan Paul London and Boston First published in 1974 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, London E C 4V 5E L and 9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, £/&4 in Monotype Baskerville 11 pt 1 pt leaded and printed in Great Britain by The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton © Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd ig?4 N o part o f this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fo r the quotation o f brief passages in criticism ISBN o 7100 7845 5 Library of Congress Catalog Card No, 13-93635 Contents Introduction vii J . W. Binns University o f Birmingham I The Latin Poetry of Thomas Campion i J . W. Binns University o f Birmingham II The Latin Poetry of George Herbert 26 W. Hilton Kelliher The British Museum III The Latin Poetry of John Milton 58 R . W. Condee Pennsylvania State University IV Richard Crashaw’s Epigrammata Sacra 93 Kenneth J . Larsen University of Auckland V The Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne 121 Mark Storey The Queen's University o f Belfast VI The Latin Poetry of Walter Savage Landor 150 Andrea Kelly Index i 9 4 Page Intentionally Left Blank Introduction A surprisingly large number of English poets wrote Latin poetry, down to the time of Walter Savage Landor in the nineteenth century, the last major poet to compose a sub­ stantial number of Latin verses. By Landor’s time, and even a century earlier, the fitness for poetry of the English language was indisputable, and there is to some extent an air of precio­ sity, of literary trifling, in much of the Latin verse then pro­ duced. Nonetheless a substantial amount of Latin poetry even from that period has survived; it was appreciated by the polite taste of the times; and it can still today enrich our understand­ ing of the authors who wrote it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the prestige of the Latin language was still enormous. Only hind­ sight enables us to laugh at poets who were in doubt whether to entrust their works to the English language. Milton’s own consideration of the merits of English, as against Latin, as the language appropriate for his major poetry is well known. Latin, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was after all still the international language of diplomacy, science and learning. As late as the 1670s it was in a Latin version that Anthony a Wood’s History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford was accepted for publication, whilst as the language even of science Latin held sway for well over a century beyond that vii J. W. BINNS date. Latin was too the language of the vast and immeasurable body of neo-Latin literature, to which the authors discussed in this volume made their conscious contribution. No one has ever counted the number of books written in Latin in the two centuries from 1500, but it runs into tens of thousands. More­ over, any book written in Latin by its very nature had as its author a man of some education, and was addressed to a like audience. There was then a simple but compelling reason for a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English poet to wish to write in Latin: the desire for an international audience and inter­ national recognition. The population of England was small, and the language, in those pre-imperial days, little disseminated in the lands beyond the seas. Knowledge in Europe of English was rare; of Latin, commonplace. The great work of Milton, Paradise Lost, was at an early date appreciated in seventeenth- century Europe in Latin versions. A poet thus seemed justified in writing in a language whose future seemed assured by a millennium and a half of pre-eminence, a language in which, across the frontiers, he could speak to a cultivated European audience. A poet from the new Commonwealth finds himself in a similar position today vis-a-vis English. If he wishes to be talked about in the literary circles of London and New York, it were well that he write in English, not in Urdu nor Malay, nor in the dialect of an African tribe. And Latin, being then quite without rival as an international language, enjoyed a position surpassing even that of English today. There was too another reason for writing in Latin. It made possible a much closer imitation of the Latin models so much admired. Languages have different structures and, as every translator knows, it is not possible to carry over from one lan­ guage into another the totality of a passage’s effect. ‘English Seneca’ is as much English as Seneca. A closer imitation of a hexameter of Vergil, or of an ode of Horace, can be attained in Latin than in English, and this is important if praise for poetry is to be measured out for close adherence to a classical model. Such imitations of Latin authors may seem today to be mere pastiches. There is a tendency for Renaissance Latin poetry to be dismissed as ‘faded flowers’ : and perhaps it does not stand up well to the techniques of literary criticism now in vogue. A poet is likely to be less able to mould the Latin language into a viii INTRODUCTION new style, less able to stamp the impress of his personality on his verse, less able to shake himself free from the weight of the past as it pressed upon him with the marmoreal perfection of the Latin language. The clusters of poetic commonplaces and modes of expression, the conventional themes, instilled by the processes of education, by school grammars and Jlorilegia, all these are liable to circumscribe the poet as he searches for the words of his poem. But this does not mean that Renaissance Latin poetry could not be original in its subject matter, or in its treatment of themes and ideas. What are its subjects and whence derive its themes and ideas ? Are they found too in vernacular poetry ? If so, how are they modified as they pass between the learned language and the more popular? Study of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century poetry could profitably proceed along those lines. When we come to the English poets who also essayed to prove themselves in Latin, the interest of their Latin poetry is self- evident. Their Latin poetry is a part of the corpus of their writings. What is its significance, and its relation to their work in English? Can we interpret their English poems in the light of their achievements in Latin? How is our judgment of a poet altered by an awareness of his Latin works ? These are some of the questions raised in this volume by discussions of the Latin poetry of six English poets from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries - Campion, Herbert, Milton, Crashaw, Bourne, and Landor. These poets exemplify, I believe, the changing fortunes of Anglo-Latin verse throughout these three centuries. In the Elizabethan Age, many Englishmen such as William Gager, Walter Haddon and Christopher Jonson achieved renown as neo-Latin poets, but they wrote either wholly, or else mainly, in the learned language.
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