The Loom of Latin

Abstract

The Loom of Latin Michael C. J. Putnam Let me begin with a bit of autobiography which I happily share with others in this room, including past, present and future presidents of our learned society. I came of age in the Harvard of the Fifties where it was my good fortune to study with two extraordinary teachers, J. P. Elder and Cedric Whitman. They served as notable models for the combination of philological rigor with imaginative insight they displayed in their scholarly writing—Elder in a series of sharply etched, brilliant essays on Catullus, Horace and Lucretius, Whitman through his reading of Sophocles but especially in the chapters on "Fire and Other Elements " and "Achilles" in his landmark book on Homer. After my return to pursue graduate work it was also my privilege to become the friend of Reuben Brower whose books, beginning with The Fields of Light, not to speak of his generosity of spirit and humanity as a pedagogue, served as models for a host of young educators-to-be. What we learned to combine, first by osmosis, then by scrutiny of its intellectual background and prized texts, was the best of New Criticism with the training required of a philologist, to become, literally, lovers of words. The two were in important ways complementary. The bibles of New Criticism, works such as I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism and Seven Types of Ambiguity by his student William Empson, allowed us to put our education to use, strengthening our understanding of the richness of meaning contained in our chosen works of genius. To view literature whole was a fundamental ambition, whether we discovered this unity through tracing strands of imagery, from observing figuration at work, or in the search for ring-composition. What we eschewed was the rigidity with which the New Critics tended to interpret writing in vacuo, apart from the various contexts which gave it birth.1 Intellectual setting was crucial, signifying not only position vis-à-vis the output of a single author but placement [End Page 329] within the sweep of ancient literature and the works it influenced. Here in the background were John Livingston Lowes, on Coleridge's sources, and Caroline Spurgeon on Keats' use of Shakespeare—the theoretical beginnings, as it were, of the exploration of allusion which has become and will, I dare say, continue to be such a vital critical tool. There were many other powerful aids available to us for eliciting meaning, a few of which I will single out. For those interested in variations of style as representative of varied realities Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) was a beacon. There was also psychology, especially the work of Jung and his followers. I remember the potent impression caused by my first reading of Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry and of Northrop Frye, writing first on Blake (1947), then, ten years later, Anatomy of Criticism. There were also many influential works emanating from historians of religion and myth. I think particularly of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published a year before I entered college. What we did not fully sense until some time had passed was that we were at the beginning of a renaissance in the study of Latin literature and, in particular, in the rethinking of the accomplishments of some of its major poets. Let me use Virgil as an example. The Virgil we were born into was the product of two main interpretative sources. The first was his designation as a chauvinistic glorifier of empire, a view propounded with authority in the pages of Richard Heinze's Virgils epische Technik (1903). His was a Virgil that had already fitted comfortably with English and German readers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second Virgil was the creator of a hero perceived as passive in his responses, proto-Christian in his ethics, ever responding with sympathy to the world around him. This was the stoic Aeneas which T. S. Eliot put before us at the end of the second World War in What is a Classic? (1945) and which we also find five years later in Viktor Pöschl's Die Dichtkunst Virgils...