Wordsworth's Aeneid

Abstract

A T THE HEIGHT of his creative power, in 1805, Wordsworth wrote to Walter Scott: has neither a nor a sense of moral dignity; where his language is poetically impassioned, is mostly upon unpleasing subjects; such as follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men or of individuals. That his cannot be language of imagination must have necessarily followed from this, that there is not a single image from Nature in whole body of his works; and in his translations from Vergil, whenever Vergil can be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils passage.' Wordsworth's criticism of his neo-Augustan predecessors, and his resentment of their translations from classics (e.g., in a later letter to Scott he remarks that it will require yet half a century completely to carry off poison of Pope's Homer),2 offer considerable evidence for what W. J. Bate has termed the burden of past, and Harold Bloom the anxiety of poetic influence. Readers have long felt temperamental affinities of Wordsworth with Virgil, his similar appreciation of a universal sorrow which touches and colors all mortal affairs, and his own tender heart and lofty sense of moral dignity. But Wordsworth's admiration for Virgil and his attempt to pay homage to master in a translation of Aeneid in 1823-24 have received little critical attention.3 The three books of Virgil which Words-