Volume 30, Number 16 · October 27, 1983
The Return of Virgil
By D.S. Carne-Ross
The Aeneid
by Virgil, translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Random House, 402 pp., $20.00
A great poem? Yes, of course, but not in the very front rank, not quite in the same class as the Iliad and The Divine Comedy. So, I think, the common judgment on the Aeneid now runs. Eliot struck the note when, contrasting Tennyson's 'Ulysses' with the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, he described the 'Tennyson-Virgilianism' of the diction as 'too poetical in comparison with Dante to be the highest poetry.' If Virgil has not, like Milton in the Thirties, been 'dethroned,' it is because, a few cantankerous poets apart (Pound, Graves), those who go in for such demolition work have not cared enough one way or the other. Let the Mantuan gather dust in his niche. What harm is he doing?
Review, 3239 words
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