“A loftier tone”: “Laodamia,” the Aeneid, and Wordsworth’s Virgilian Imagination

This article argues that Wordsworth’s “Laodamia” demonstrates the shaping influence exercised by Virgil’s Aeneid over the English poet’s creative imagination. In its focus on the title character’s devoted but ultimately self-destroying love for her husband Protesilaus, the first Greek warrior to die at Troy, “Laodamia” treats a theme that had long preoccupied Wordsworth as both a poet and a reader of Virgil. Wordsworth constructs his narrative around an allusive counterpoint with the Aeneid, echoing the distinctive stylistic patterns of Virgil’s Latin while modifying, combining, and rearranging details from the epic’s plot, particularly its two major episodes of doomed female love: Andromache’s hopeless mourning at the tomb of Hector in book 3 and Dido’s self-consuming passion for Aeneas in book 4. In the depth and the variety of its relationships with the Aeneid, “Laodamia” constitutes one of the most multifaceted examples in literary history of an English poet’s creative engagement with the classical inheritance.