Introduction

Matthew Arnold’s On Translating Homer is usually discussed only in considerations of nineteenth-century translation theory. Written in response to Francis William Newman’s 1856 balladic translation of the Iliad, Arnold’s three-part essay—delivered as a lecture series at Oxford in 1860, but not published until 1861—condemns Newman for failing to render Homer’s nobility. This failure, Arnold argues, is due to Newman’s archaic “odd diction” and to his choice of genre, the ballad: “the ballad-style and the ballad-measure are eminently inappropriate to render Homer. Homer’s manner and movement are always both noble and powerful: the ballad-manner and movement are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and humdrum, so not powerful.”¹ Newman, in his response piece, Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice (1861), argued that the ballad meter “is essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great capacity,” and condemned Arnold’s derision of “ballad-manner” by arguing that, if hymns could be written in the “Common Metre” that is “the prevalent ballad-metre,” then it is inaccurate of Arnold to assume that “whatever is in this metre must be [all] on the same level.”² Arnold then rebutted Newman’s response with an 1862 lecture and article titled On Translating Homer: Last Words, in which he repeats his charges that “the English ballad-style is not an instrument of enough compass and force to correspond to the Greek hexameter,” and that “the ballad-form is entirely inadequate” to Homer’s “grand style.”³

Although it is usually figured as a debate about the purpose and method of classical translation, this famous disagreement is also a debate about the nature of the ballad. The ballad was a broad, loose category in the nineteenth century, and Arnold’s use of the term—often qualified by hyphenation—exemplifies the breadth of features that might have been considered balladic. In On Translating Homer, Arnold refers variously to the “ballad-style” (pp. 46, 48, 59, 60), “ballad-measure” (pp. 47, 83), “ballad-manner” (pp. 47, 49, 51, 55, 60), “ballad-slang” (p. 51), “ballad-rhythm” (p. 52), “ballad-metre” (p. 67), “ballad-verse” (pp. 43, 69), and “ballad-swing” (p. 57); most of these terms he defined by example, by quoting a passage and then positing its qualities as self-evident: “That is the true ballad-manner, no one can deny”; “any scholar will feel that this is not Homer’s manner” (pp. 51, 57, emphasis in original). In Last Words, Arnold adds to these hyphenated terms “ballad-character” (as in, “On this question about the ballad-character of Homer’s poetry, I see that Professor Blackie proposes a compromise”) and “ballad-form” (as in, “the ballad-form [is] from a form not commensurate with [Homer’s] subject-matter” [pp. 58–59]). What these examples reveal is that Arnold is drawing on a conception of balladry that he either assumes is shared broadly or positions as if it is shared broadly, and yet the proliferation of hyphenated qualifiers suggests that this genre is in constant need of clarification and definition. Arnold writes about the ballad as if there is a critical consensus as to what this genre is or does—as if all agree about its style, its manner, its meter, its ignobility. Because of the importance of Arnold as a Victorian thinker and critic, his side of the debate overshadows his contemporary opponents; On Translating Homer effectively constructed a critical consensus out of what had been a more diverse set of assumptions about the ballad, its characteristics, and its connotations.

Recent critical work on nineteenth-century poetry—work that is beginning to extend to treatments of the ballad—has begun to interrogate the diversity of meanings associated with poetic terms related to genre and to reading.⁴ For instance, Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery (2005) and Meredith Martin’s The Rise and Fall of Meter (2012) have shown that terms like “lyric” and “prosody,” respectively, are culturally determined; at the same time, however, these works show that reading practices have brought definition and stability to diffuse...