Mending the Well-Wrought Urn

One form my teenage rebellion took was to embrace a version of aestheticism (not that I knew the word then). I devoured books like Walter Pater's Renaissance, or the brothers Goncourt on French rococo painting, and wrote an essay on the diaphanous beauties of Giambattista Tiepolo for my somewhat bemused schoolmaster. I thought then, as I think now, that historicist approaches too often neglect the literary or aesthetic character of their objects of study, in a manner that can verge on philistinism. My favorite critical book when reading for Mods at Oxford in 1968–69 was Steele Commager's The Odes of Horace, published six years earlier but not recommended by my teachers (and barely mentioned in the great Oxford commentary by Nisbet and Hubbard). It's a book that, half a century later, in my experience wears remarkably well, with its sophisticated attention to the detailed verbal texture of Horatian lyric. Only later would I learn to think of this as the classicist's version of the New Criticism (another favorite was Christopher Ricks's Milton's Grand Style, very much the sort of book I wanted to write myself). The New Critical slogan for this is "the words on the page," and, while we know words are never just on the page, the primary job of the literary critic surely remains to address this particular combination of words in a poem or piece of prose. So I was well prepared to receive favorably the writings of Adam Parry on Homer and Virgil, including the "Two Voices" essay that became one of founding charters of what was oddly reified by W. R. Johnson under the name Harvard School. Parry's essay was first published in Arion in 1963 (what a great project that journal has proved, with its predominantly literary and critical emphasis), and republished in a collection, on the whole but not entirely New Critical in character, edited by Commager, in 1966. Few surely would have guessed just how large an impact it would have. In the recent Wiley-Black-well Virgil Encyclopedia, Parry's presence is everywhere, with entries on "'two voices' theory," "winners and losers" (these two by Harvard scholar and member of the School Richard Thomas, one of the editors), "ambiguity," "Harvard School," and "optimism and pessimism," among others. And in retrospect it is not hard to see the reasons for its enduring appeal. It presents a strong thesis that is easily taught and grasped, and that can readily be applied to almost any part of the Virgilian corpus. (In that respect it is like Stanley Fish's hugely influential reading of Paradise Lost, Surprised by Sin (1967), according to which the reader is continually caught out in her fallenness, only to have her views corrected by the poem.) It makes Virgil available again for readers of liberal sympathies, hostile to war, imperialism, and one-man rule, and thus makes Virgil again "ours" as he was for Seneca. And above all it is seductively written—critics who want to persuade others of their views please take note!

Later, disciplined by the severities of a newer poststructuralist criticism, I would come to see some of the vulnerabilities of Parry's thesis, and I wrote about these in 1993 in Redeeming the Text (40–43) and "Descent into Hell: Reading Ambiguity, or Virgil and the Critics." Parry's catapulting into fame of the plangent lines on the dead Umbro as "the lyric cry" that sets a tone for the whole poem might be countered by other choices; if we are to trust Suetonius, Augustus' could have been Romanos rerum dominos gentemque togatam ("the Romans, masters of the world and the toga-wearing race," Aen. 1.282). While of course publicus and privatus are Latin words, it is not clear how well they map onto the categories of "public" and "private" as used by a twentieth-century liberal. In Horace Ode 1.37, Cleopatra is privata when no longer a queen; it is not necessarily the case that for Virgil the landscape's lament for its young men who die in its defense is a private matter...