The Harvard School(s) and Latin Poetry, 1977–91: A Bildungserinnerung

I first encountered the phrase Harvard School not long after Ralph Johnson coined it, at a formative moment, during my initial semester of graduate school in fall 1977. In all candor, I've never before asked myself what impact the phrase, or whatever reality lies behind it, may have had on me at the time. In doing so now, however, strikes me as a useful catalyst for organizing memories of the many influences that I was then absorbing, some of which have proven to be decisive.

The immediate context was a graduate seminar on the Aeneid taught by Agnes Michels, who would soon after become my dissertation director. It was probably the best course I ever took, mainly because Mrs. Michels (as all students called her, at least in the vocative; generally, she was "Nan") was such a wonderful teacher. But there were other factors. First, Vergil was (and is) my favorite writer, and the Aeneid was (and is) my favorite poem. Second, I already knew the Aeneid pretty well, having studied all of it as a junior in high school and having reread parts of it repeatedly throughout college. But third, I knew almost nothing of Vergilian scholarship, having spent my undergraduate years at Bowdoin College (1973–77) getting acquainted with other Greek and Latin authors in a program that emphasized precisely that, to the exclusion of almost anything else. And fourth, my other important project as an undergraduate was to teach myself about poetry as something other than, and more than, decorated prose, as a medium that makes meaning in ways different from the ways of prose. In those days, to be frank, the classics major at Bowdoin didn't contribute much to this project. It offered an excellent opportunity to go further and deeper into the languages themselves, but that was almost its entire focus. Learning a systematic method of literary interpretation didn't really enter into it.¹ For such things, I took several English courses, picked up quite a bit from friends who were studying modern literature, and read whatever works on literary theory and interpretive method happened to come my way. One result was that I arrived at graduate school in Chapel Hill with a good bit of Latin and Greek under my belt; some very eclectic ideas about how to interpret poetry; and virtually no experience in combining these two interests, despite a strong desire to do so.

Nan's Aeneid seminar was where everything started coming together. The influence of her own example was immense, and here it's useful to remember that she was not a specialist in Vergil, or poetry, or even literature. Her main publication is a still-authoritative book on The Calendar of the Roman Republic (1967). The next course I took with her was on "Roman Religious Institutions," the area in which she was a particular expert. But Nan had spent the previous forty years at Bryn Mawr teaching just about everything in Roman studies. She knew all the poets practically by heart, and she knew the Vergilian bibliography very well, partly because she adored Vergil, and partly because of Vergil's prominence in Latin literary studies, especially in those days. I've already characterized my own thinking (such as it was) about poetry in 1977 as eclectic; and I believe one of the reasons Nan's teaching spoke to me so powerfully was that she was also rather eclectic. But, of course, Nan was an immeasurably better informed eclectic who had spent a scholarly lifetime putting together what might have remained a random collection of disordered factoids into a distinctively personal but effectively totalizing perspective on the ancient Roman world. So she brought to the reading of the Aeneid, quite apart from her sheer enjoyment of the poem and of reading it with students, an inexhaustible supply of tales from Livy, often related with a dollop of Macaulay on the side, a lot of antiquarian lore from countless sources, boundless memories and sayings of Lily Ross Taylor, and much else that made every minute of that seminar...