Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception Edited by Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (review)

The idea that Virgil’s poems form not just an oeuvre or a corpus but a career and, what is more, not just an individual poetic career but the ideal poetic career has of course been enormously influential in the two millennia since his death. As well, in the last few decades the idea of a poetic career has given critics a way to talk about poets without, often, discussing the poems themselves in any great detail. And while authorial intention has for the most part been removed from discussions of individual poems, it has returned in discussions of a poet’s output as a whole.

Near the beginning of their introduction, the editors ask who decides whether a poet has a career. I think that this is a very interesting and productive question, and I was sorry that the chapters themselves do not, as a rule, attempt to answer it, although a tacit answer often emerges over the course of the discussion. In addition, I would have liked more consideration of the possible connections between a literary career in this specialized sense and a career in the more literal sense: economic matters are only rarely allowed to intrude.

This omission seems especially odd as many of the chapters on Latin poetry fruitfully contrast the poet’s career with the cursus honorum. Indeed, one of the most interesting and (in this context) unusual chapters, by Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel, looks at Cicero and Pliny the Younger. I found this chapter a fascinating extension of the idea of a poetic career to writers who wrote (almost) exclusively in prose and who had other careers as well. I also thought that Patrick Cheney’s fine chapter on Shakespeare—the title is “Did Shakespeare Have a Literary Career?”—would have profited from some discussion of Shakespeare’s exceptionally successful literary career both pre- and postmortem. [End Page e-1]

These are minor quibbles, however. The collection has many strong points. One of the most important is the decision to interrogate Virgil’s own career. This is done twice, first by Michael C. J. Putnam, in the first essay in the collection, and later by Nita Krevans. Putnam gives us a way of thinking about Virgil’s career that is not linear and certainly not teleological: he makes the point that the Virgilian rota is only one way of understanding Virgil’s output. Krevans looks at the story that Virgil ordered the Aeneid to be burned; she goes on to consider the effect of this story on later writers. Both of these essays are excellent, fresh, and thought provoking.

In many of the other chapters, the tendency is to posit, somewhat uncritically, a Virgilian rota. Nevertheless, many of these essays still deliver excellent discussions. My personal favorite is Stephen Heyworth’s essay on Propertius, a poet who seems at times perversely determined not to have a career. Heyworth’s analysis is not only a persuasive analysis of much of Propertius’s poetry but also a celebration of its excellence. This essay is a model for literary criticism.

While all the chapters are good—I would say that the weakest is Stuart Gillespie’s metempsychosis, which displays a great deal of reading but almost no analysis—one of the best features of the collection is the editors’ decision to extend the chronological focus. Discussions of literary careers usually focus either on Latin poetry or on postclassical poetry. This collection is especially interesting as, in addition to the chapters on Latin poetry, there are substantial discussions of Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Goethe, and Wordsworth.

Yes, Goethe and Wordsworth. Nicola Trott’s essay on Wordsworth is one of the highlights of the collection as a whole, demonstrating the uneasy relation of Wordsworth’s poetic practice to his famous statements in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. In his intriguing contribution, Joseph Farrell shows how Goethe’s Roman sojourn provoked a useful return...