Verse Epistle Research Articles

The Road Not Taken: Dante’s First Eclogue and Virgil’s Career

Near the end of his career, Dante wrote two eclogues, instigating a literary fashion which was to outlast the Renaissance. These poems—Dante's only known compositions in Latin verse—were prompted by a verse epistle from Giovanni ‘del Virgilio’, in which the humanist scholar goaded Dante to compose a martial epic in Latin celebrating contemporary Italian military victories, which would prove him a worthy successor to the author of the Aeneid. Dante’s response is an elaborate bucolic recusatio, which engages in a rich and intricate intertextual dialogue both with Virgil and with his correspondent. Through a pattern of allusions emphasizing the theme of land-confiscation and dispossession in Virgil’s Bucolica and his denunciation of the avarice and violence of contemporary Rome in the Georgics, Dante makes the case that his own career has fulfilled the noble aspirations which Virgil himself compromised, when he abandoned the idea of a cosmological epic, entertained in the second Georgic and chose instead to glorify war and the emperor in the Aeneid.

Poems about translation: a neglected form of theory

ABSTRACT This work is premised on the assertion that poems about translation can offer a way of doing theory, providing a resource that may elude rational discourse and reach the reader at least partly through eliciting aesthetic response. In many cases the poems presented and discussed are well known and broadly resonant; in others, quite obscure ‘occasional’ poems, but as a whole they show great teachable potential as a set of interrelated cases. Subgenres that poems about translation take, such as the verse epistle and the translator’s prefatory poem, are discerned, and ten subtypes of translation themes–such as the translator’s identity, translation framing and criticism, apologia for translation, advice to the translator – are distinguished in this non-exhaustive canon, and one may historicise and draw further conclusions about the poems in or against their respective eras of composition. The pedagogical usefulness of these works is strengthened by the analytical attention given to key features of the texts for elucidating principles, thematics, and historical debates on literary translation for the classroom.

The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey (1696–1743), ed. Bill Overton, with Elaine Hobby and James McLaverty.

<i>The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey (1696–1743)</i>, ed. Bill Overton, with Elaine Hobby and James McLaverty.

Christmas presents for John Tzetzes: a new verse epistle from the letter collection

Abstract The corpus of Tzetzes’ epistles edited by Pietro Luigi Leone in 1972 includes 107 letters. However, two of the earliest manuscript witnesses of the collection bequeath a 108th letter consisting of 16 iambs and closing the corpus. The short missive is addressed to one Konstantinos Phyteianos. The present paper provides the first edition and translation into English of this letter, analysing its authorship and contents as well as its rhetorical function within the corpus.

‘An illegal private transaction’: Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters and Epistolarity

The publication of Ted Hughes‘s Birthday Letters in 1998 caused a sensation well beyond poetry circles and represented a striking late transformation in the poetics of this giant of contemporary British verse. Hughes, it seemed, had finally validated the post-war confessional impulse he had spent decades resisting. Accordingly, the eighty-eight poems in this collection have been afforded significant critical attention; but much less analysis has been offered of the volume's title, and, consequently, of its epistolary status. To put this another way, Birthday Letters has been mined for its (chiefly biographical) meaning, but the vehicle which Hughes chose to make meaning warrants deeper analysis if the collection is to be properly understood. This discussion explores Birthday Letters in relation to epistolarity. It locates the volume within a tradition of verse epistles, and thinks through the implications of these poems’ epistolary form.

Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith

Reviewed by: Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith Diana Barnes Ross, Sarah C. E., Rosalind Smith, eds Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ( Early Modern Literature in History), London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; hardback; pp. 370; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €99.00; ISBN 9783030429454. Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics is an exciting new collection of fifteen essays on early modern women's complaint which represents a welcome extension of current scholarship on early modern women's engagement with complaint, one of the most pervasive literary modes in English writing in print and manuscript over the years 1550–1700. Much scholarship to date has identified Ovid's Heroides as the locus classicus for early modern complaint, but Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith, the editors of this collection, argue that the mode is far more capacious. The volume traces the genealogy of female complaint through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious, political, legal, and philosophical discourses, and its critical reception and recent representation in digital scholarly resources. For early modern writers, Ovid's verse epistles voiced by heroines addressing the heroes who raped, entrapped, and abandoned them, paired with some replies, thematized the potentials of women's writing to overturn the priorities of hegemonic discourses. Although a number of early [End Page 253] modern women writers, including Isabella Whitney, cite this tradition, Ovid's Heroides was a troublesome legacy owing to its licentious subject matter and its male-authored ventriloquy of women's complaint. As Early Modern Women's Complaint shows, the Heroides was just one element in early modern women's complaint. The essays are organized in four chronologically ordered sections, followed by an afterword. Part I, 'Sixteenth Century', comprises four chapters. Susan M. Felch contends that Anne Lock deployed prophetic and penitential complaint to instruct her readers and thus advance Calvinist Reform over the 1540s to 1590s. Micheline White outlines Katherine Parr's evolving use of religious complaint to lament on behalf of her husband, Henry VIII, in Psalms and Prayers (1544), and later, writing as the dowager queen, to urge for Protestant reform in Lamentation or Complaint of a Sinner (1547). Tricia A. McElroy analyses the prevalence of female-voiced complaint in Scottish political propaganda of the 1560s and 1570s, when the ideal of wifely virtue was fraught following the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567. Lindsay Ann Reid examines Isabella Whitney's adaptation of autobiographical affect derived from Ovid's Tristia rather than his Heroides to articulate careerist poetic ambitions in The Copy of a Letter (1566–67) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573). Part II, 'Seventeenth Century', includes four chapters. In the first, Emily Shortslef investigates Mary Cary's use of complaint to embrace anti-Stoic inconstancy in her closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Paul Salzman examines how Mary Wroth employs the 'dirty pain' (p. 142) generated by complaint to 'bridge between the personal and political' (p. 138) in her manuscript play Love's Victory and in the second part of her romance Urania. Danielle Clarke tracks the 'interpellation of complaint (p. 158) indebted to Du Bartas through the writing of Aemilia Lanyer, Anne, Lady Southwell, and Lucy Hutchinson. Sarah C. E. Ross challenges the association between Ovidian complaint and 'isolation, distortion, and deception' (p. 186), demonstrating how Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, and John Milton use the Ovidian figure of Echo to construct female community within pastoral complaint. Part III, 'Restoration', contains three chapters. Gillian Wright considers Aphra Behn's complaint 'Oenone to Paris', in John Dryden's collection Ovid's Epistles, Translated by Several Hands (1680), to redirect critical attention from Dryden's theorization of translation towards the ideological and political implications of Restoration complaint. Whereas Dryden expressed 'clear signs of unease with royal sexual self-indulgence' (p. 210), Behn 'dramatiz[ed] conflicts between power and sexuality' (p. 219). Susan Wiseman extends the discussion of complaint to North America with a fascinating account of how Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) is 'deeply mulched with the matter of complaint' (p. 233), adapting 'experiential testimony and...

‘An illegal private transaction’: Ted Hughes's &lt;em&gt;Birthday Letters&lt;/em&gt; and Epistolarity

The publication of Ted Hughes‘s Birthday Letters in 1998 caused a sensation well beyond poetry circles and represented a striking late transformation in the poetics of this giant of contemporary British verse. Hughes, it seemed, had finally validated the post-war confessional impulse he had spent decades resisting. Accordingly, the eighty-eight poems in this collection have been afforded significant critical attention; but much less analysis has been offered of the volume's title, and, consequently, of its epistolary status. To put this another way, Birthday Letters has been mined for its (chiefly biographical) meaning, but the vehicle which Hughes chose to make meaning warrants deeper analysis if the collection is to be properly understood. This discussion explores Birthday Letters in relation to epistolarity. It locates the volume within a tradition of verse epistles, and thinks through the implications of these poems’ epistolary form.

“Un-English” Chaucer: Macaronic Verse and Codicological Form in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27

This essay reconsiders the earliest extant manuscript to collect Chaucer’s works by attending to those of its poems that have heretofore been considered most marginal to its canonizing project: an anonymous pair of trilingual, tail-rhymed verse epistles. Reading these trilingual poems as integral to this Chaucerian anthology teases apart the often-twinned narratives of Chaucer’s canonization and the canonization of English as national literary language. The essay first explores the codex’s assembly and reception history to suggest that Englishness is not a prerequisite for Chaucerian canonicity within this fifteenth-century collection. The second section challenges the broader narrative of the emergence of English as “mother tongue” of a trilingual literary culture by looking to the macaronic poems themselves. I propose that the verse, rhetorical, and material forms of these poems—the very forms that make them most legible as Chaucerian—mobilize the permeability and fungibility of languages in contact such that no one language has an inevitable claim to authority within their multilingual milieu. It can therefore be argued that Gg.4.27 assembles an “un-English” Chaucer, whose forms are not only collected from French, Latin, and Italian models but continue to gather multilingual texts into the archive of English literature. The relationship between Gg.4.27 and its trilingual poems thus presents a limit case for the analogy between macaronic poem and multilingual codex more broadly, expanding our understanding of which literary objects count as witnesses to multilingualism and what stories they might tell.

The (lost) tune of ‘Raging Love’ and its reverberations in Isabella Whitney’s Copy of a Letter

This article argues that Isabella Whitney’s verse epistles ‘To Her Unconstant Lover’ and ‘The Admonition’ in The Copy of a Letter (c. 1566–67) are enmeshed more thoroughly in the early modern English soundscape than previous criticism has tended to acknowledge. Seeking to enrich current understandings of Whitney’s confluences, this article first examines the vibrant musical sphere in which The Copy of a Letter’s printer-publisher Richard Jones was demonstrably immersed before moving on to explore the more specific implications of an acoustically evocative allusion to ‘Raging Love’ (a now-lost Elizabethan ballad melody) in the opening lines of ‘The Admonition’.

Myrmeicus or Myrmecius?

AbstractIn this article, I examine the name of a friend and correspondent of the fourth-century poet Rufius Festus Avienius, commonly identified hitherto as Flavianus Myrmeicus. After summarising the current state of research and translating the verse epistle which he received, I argue that, for a variety of reasons, Myrmeicus cannot be his name. Instead, it should be emended to Myrmecius, which was his signum: an example of a type of nickname which many Romans of elevated status in late antiquity bore in addition to their birth names. I examine Myrmecius as a signum within the context of late-Roman supernomina more generally, in the process clarifying how and in what circumstances and combinations they were used, and suggesting several sources from which they might be derived. I then explain how Myrmecius’ signum might have been mangled in the course of transmission, and conclude by noting that while the bulk of attested signa are found on inscriptions, Myrmecius suggests that many more may currently lie concealed in literary texts.

Al borde de la literariedad: literatura y epistolaridad

Para afrontar el problema de la literariedad de la escritura epistolar, no reducida a una calidad de estilo, se considera primero el tránsito a la alfabetizacion (literacy) facilitado desde antiguo por los manuales de correspondencia; la ilusión de no-ficcionalidad que oculta el impulso de ficcionalidad; y la tradición de la teoría epistolar desde Grecia. Como signo del tránsito a la literariedad, se examina ante todo la continuidad del géncro literario, que el escritor admite. Unos ejemplos representativos se destacan: a mediados del siglo XIV, la decisión por parte de Petrarca de reunir una colección unitaria de epístolas familiares; la epístola en verso de Garcilaso a Boscán el año 1534; las lettere volgari del Aretino tras 1538; y el arranque decisivo de la novela epistolar en 1669 con las Lettres portugaises de Guilleragues. En cada caso se observa la especificidad genérica como modo de adscribirse a la lileratura.

John Beveridge, the Neo-Latin Horatian Ode and the Narrative of British Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century North America

The composition of Neo-Latin poetry was integral to the bilingual literary culture of eighteenth-century Britain, and the practice was taken by the British colonists to America. Yet the role of this Neo-Latin verse in the new political, religious and social setting of early North America has remained largely unexplored. This article examines the Latin Horatian odes published by the colonial poet John Beveridge in his Epistolae familiares (Philadelphia, 1765), a collection of Latin verse epistles. Beveridge used his Latin poetry to not only describe but justify British colonisation of North America. His appropriation of Horatian models for the colonial experience was influenced by the later reception of Horace’s poems which attributed religious and political significance to them – in order to reflect the moral, religious and cultural superiority of Christian Europeans in America. By exploring the cultural symbolism of Latin poetry, this article enables a greater understanding of the place of Neo-Latin literature in the colonial endeavour to Anglicize, Europeanize and Christianize America.

Shelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” as Workshop Poetry

ABSTRACTShelley’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne” is a playful improvisational verse epistle, widely praised for its urbanity and its display of the poet’s invention. The verses turn on a catalogue of the collection of odd scientific and mechanical objects that Shelley found scattered around him in the place he composed the letter, the Livorno workshop of Gisborne’s son, a young engineer who was building a new-model steamboat at the time (with Shelley’s financial and intellectual backing). In the context of that space, the poem reads as a response to competing notions of invention. For Shelley, the engineer’s workshop is an attractive alternative to the poet’s tower—which was uncomfortably close to a Grub Street garret. Verbal and visual images of poets’ and scientists’ workshops, from Hogarth and Mary Robinson, to Joseph Wright of Derby and Frankenstein, illustrate the tensions embodied in the physical location and poetic performance of Shelley’s celebrated “Letter.”

'A melhor parte de mim'. As epístolas matrimonias de Pêro Andrade Caminha

Em dois momentos particularmente impressionantes da história da epistolografia, Pêro Andrade Caminha (1520-1580), um dos mais importantes poetas da Literatura Portuguesa do século XVI, escreveu sobre o casamento cristão. Tratava-se de uma nova temática na qual Caminha emulava e expandia o modelo horaciano das epístolas em verso. As duas cartas de Andrade Caminha – a primeira, endereçada a Alexandre Farnese e a segunda, a D. Miguel de Noronha – tomaram como referência o epitalâmio, um gênero literário dedicado aos noivos. A partir disso, é possível investigar a concepção da temática do casamento como verdadeira amizade e, em perspectiva complementar, a poesia como valor aristocrático e espiritual. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n45a1028.

En corte extraña: Las epístolas de Diego Hurtado de Mendoza a Luis de Ávila y ZúñigaIn Foreign Court: Diego Hurtado de Mendoza's Epistles to Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga

AbstractThe two verse epistles addressed by Diego Hurtado to Luis de ávila define a discourse in which the satire about public life and the exaltation of the emperor and his victories give way to the Anacreontic celebration of the voluntarilt isolated way of life, wine, friendship, and modest pleasures. Nevertheless, in spite of these common features, both poems present important differences. In contrast to the sober and grievous tone of the first one, the second turns out rough and unbalanced, sprinkled with harsh remarks that show a disenchantment with diplomatic life, the humiliations and disappointments suffered by the ambassadors, who were victims especially vulnerable to the political labyrinth and court intrigue of the 16th century. This work examines the epistles, appreciating the early effort to create a poetic language free of Petrachan influences in order to express disconformity with court life, in a genre that joins satire, mockery and a certain existential annoyance.

Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire by Tom Hawkins (review)

Reviewed by: Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire by Tom Hawkins Jennifer Ferriss-Hill Tom Hawkins. Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 334. $99.99. ISBN 978–1-107–01208–0. Although the broad title of Iambic Poetics (even with the coda in the Roman Empire) might well be expected to herald a volume devoted to well-rehearsed authors and their works, readers will be pleasantly surprised to find here careful and compelling studies of Ovid’s Ibis, Babrius’ Mythiambi, Gregory Nazianzen, Dio Chrysostom’s First Tarsian, Lucian’s Pseudologista, and Julian’s Misopogon. Hawkins begins by elucidating the nature of Ovid’s Ibis as a prelude to further attack, a stance appealingly termed “iambus delayed.” Although the discussion has speculative moments, it is by pursuing every philological and ornithological possibility afforded by the peculiar bird for which the poem is named that Hawkins is able to do justice to this multifaceted work. As he traces the “ibidic” tradition back through Horace and (especially) Callimachus to Aristophanes and Plato, Hawkins brings to light how this rich nexus of antecedents makes meanings for the exiled elegist. The role of empire as essential to iambus is naturally prominent in this dense and detailed opening chapter, for Hawkins’ focus is not merely iambic poetics in the empire but iambic poetics and empire. In his chapter on Babrius, Hawkins strives to resurrect the poetic integrity of the Mythiambi, which suffers from being quarried for individual fables. This “new Aesop” is shown engaging with Hesiod, Hipponax, Plato, and Callimachus; as for Babrius himself, these weighty models contribute depth and complexity to his work. Concluding the book’s first half is Gregory Nazianzen, responsible for synthesizing Hellenic and Christian: after being deposed from the See of Constantinople, far from withdrawing into a guileless “meditative retirement” (144), he reinvented for himself a persona of both ascetic saint and efficacious iambist. Making use of Callimachus’ Aetia preface and the notion of poetry as a pharmakon, Gregory crafted “new and hybrid forms” (143), such as verse epistles in Greek and lengthy poetic autobiographies, in order to counter his rivals and reassert his place as a Nicene spiritual leader. The second half of the book explores how, perhaps counterintuitively, three authors of Greek prose—Dio Chrysostom (in his First Tarsian), Lucian (in the Pseudologista), and Julian (in the Misopogon)—made use of iambic poetics. The argument that these figures activated the possibilities of the Archilochean poetic tradition in their oratory is convincing, though the role of empire recedes into the background. These five later chapters are, understandably, structurally rather different from the first, as the average reader requires a great deal more in the way of context and step-by-step explication in order to follow and evaluate the arguments. Hawkins is careful to explain in his introduction the feature that unites this eclectic selection of authors: “Their combination of an overt denial of any iambic agenda with a pronounced reliance on iambic poetics” (9–10). This seems clear enough, but at times it is hard not to feel that the project is somewhat artificially circumscribed, particularly when the first, meaty chapter on Ovid’s Ibis is followed by five more on authors who, as Hawkins admits of Babrius, have “trouble finding readers today” (87). Nevertheless, Hawkins has produced a book that is both wide-ranging and focused, and that accomplishes the enviable task of treading new ground. He displays an easy command of an admirably broad range of authors, both Latin and Greek, along with their at times substantial secondary literatures, and his prose is lively and engaging. While most readers are [End Page 270] unlikely to study the entire volume, each individual chapter will prove indispensable to scholars and students interested in the particular works treated therein. Jennifer Ferriss-Hill University of Miami Copyright © 2015 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc

Suppressed Emotions: The Heroic Tristia of Portuguese (ex-)Jesuit, Emanuel de Azevedo

This article is a pilot for a larger project on the emotions of the suppression of the Society of Jesus, viewed through the prism of Latin writings by Jesuits of the period. It proposes a case study of Portuguese (ex-)Jesuit, Emanuel de Azevedo, who lived and suffered internal exile in Italy (from Rome to the Veneto) in the second half of the eighteenth century. Azevedo composed a large quantity of Latin verse during these unhappy years, from a four-book epic poem on the return of the Jesuits expelled from the American colonies to a twelve-book description of the city of Venice. The main focus here is Azevedo’s collection of Latin verse epistles, Epistolae ad heroas (Venice, 1781), loosely modeled on Ovid. Azevedo writes Latin verse both to temper his own sadness about the suppression and to console Spanish, Portuguese, and American confrères living in exile in the Papal States and in Russia under Catherine the Great.

Aristocratic house of farmers: the topos of the de re rustica in Sá de Miranda's verse epistles

This paper analyses the Francisco de Sá de Miranda's verse epistles according to some historical boundaries. It is clear that Sá de Miranda's main reason lied on the defense of "time of memory", which must be preserved, against the Portuguese expansion and the present time. To do so, Sá de Miranda proposed some doctrinal aspects of "economics" (oeconomia), "house" (oikos) and related subjects, whose vitality was reactivated in the Renaissance, through the literary translation of the so called de re rustica (subject of farmers and peasants). From classical times to the Modern Age, the "house" (oikos) was not only a question of family administration and conservation of the real state, but also of agriculture and friendship bonds.

Aristocratic house of farmers: the topos of the de re rustica in Sá de Miranda's verse epistles

Aristocratic house of farmers: the topos of the de re rustica in Sá de Miranda's verse epistles

“A Wondrous Lesson in thy Silent Face”: Keats, Darwin, and the Geological Sublime

Erasmus Darwin’s writings, which laid the foundation for his grandson Charles’s concepts of variation, natural selection, heredity, and the survival of the fittest, constituted a province of knowledge that colored and deeply troubled John Keats’s thinking. The impact of Darwinian tenets upon Keats’s imagination is most apparent in the verse epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds in the poet’s terrible vision of “an eternal fierce destruction,” a lurid scene almost directly transferable from Darwin’s The Temple of Nature. Keats’s poetry and epistolary prose are not innocent of an apprehension of the harsh reality of a state of nature that is “red in tooth and claw,” nor does Keats’s thought shy away from confronting the disturbing potential of the “geological sublime,” a fascination with the ancient history of the earth and the subversive idea that creatures occupy an ephemeral and insignificant place within its vast temporal continuum. We can tease out from Keats’s poems and letters a pattern of coping with these harsh facts of life by abstracting or anaesthetizing oneself. Keats’s strategy of evasion or withdrawal constitutes his authentic aesthetic and ethical response to the sublime horrors that a Darwinian or geological model of reality, when scrutinized by Keats’s imagination, might prompt, even if it cannot fairly be described as a remedial measure.