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Imitation and the Poetry of Virgil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Guy Lee
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Extract

Imitation, in the sense of the conscious adaptation and transference of an idea, a phrase, or a passage, from one poetical context to another, was a recognized procedure of ancient poetry, as it still is of modern. It is however a difficult art and on occasion, as we shall see, the re-working of alien material, though it may be poetically successful, is none the less achieved at some cost of clarity, accuracy, or literal truth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , April 1981 , pp. 10 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1981

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References

1. For, the combination of literary echoes and personal memories in T. S. Eliot's Marina and Burnt Norton see Gardner, Helen, ‘The Landscapes of Eliot's Poetry’, Critical Quarterly 10(1968), 323–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Servius on Aeneid 8.187: ‘secundum Lucretium superstitio est superstantium rerum, id est caelestium et diuinarum quae super nos stant, inanis et superfluus timor.’ He appears to be referring to our passage.

3. The point is made by Kraggerud, Egil in his Aeneisstudien (Oslo, 1968), p. 73Google Scholar.

4. Virgil must have liked lines 306–8, for he repeats them verbatim from Georg. 4.475–7, a context describing how the ghosts came (ibant) from the depths of the Underworld to hear the song of Orpheus.

5. I am grateful to Mr Renford Bambrough, Mr Robert Coleman, Mrs Patricia Easterling, and Professor David West for criticisms. For further discussion of imitation the interested reader is referred to Allusion, Parody and Imitation (University of Hull, 1971)Google Scholar, a published lecture by the present writer, and to West, David and Woodman, Tony (edd.), Creative Imitation and Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.