A Voyage Around the Harvard School

When I arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate to study classics in 1978, it was only a few years after the Harvard School had been so baptized by Ralph Johnson in Darkness Visible (1976). I had the great fortune to study at Balliol College, where the late Oliver Lyne (then in his mid-thirties) taught us the Aeneid, stressing in his rich and engaged tutorials the importance of verbal style, intertextuality, and potential subversive perspectives, the themes of his later Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid (1987) and Words and The Poet (1989). The Oxford reading lists of the time were relatively conservative; Brooks Otis's expansive Virgil: A Study in Civilised Poetry (1964) and W. A. Camps's sober An Introduction to Virgil's Aeneid (1969) were our major resources, along with the commentaries of R. G. Austin and R. D. Williams and the English translation of Viktor Pöschl's book, The Art of Vergil (1962). More adventurous souls might read Darkness Visible itself or Michael Putnam's The Poetry of the Aeneid, or the volume Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Steele Commager (1966).

It was in the pages of the last that I came across the classic articles of the Harvard School (Clausen 1964, Parry 1963, and Brooks 1953). These, alongside Michael Putnam's book, seemed to have something of a common agenda: pessimistic interpretations that stressed the sufferings of war and political duty for the victor as well as the victim, through close and nuanced reading of the relevant passages. I was much impressed, and indeed wrote at the beginning of my text of the Aeneid a quotation from Clausen, the famous description of the poem as "a long Pyrrhic victory of the human spirit" (146).

Between 1982 and 1986 I worked on a doctoral thesis at Oxford, a commentary on the tenth book of the Aeneid (published by OUP in 1991). I was supervised by Robin Nisbet, who under the influence of Syme's hard-edged political realism had little time for the subversive voices detected by some in the Aeneid; my introduction to the commentary shows that he had pushed me a little in his direction, and there are statements there about the politics of the Aeneid with which I might now disagree. After my appointment at Corpus Christi College in 1987, I began collecting the reprinted papers by other scholars that became Oxford Readings in Vergil's Aeneid (1990). This collection had two rationales: it put together the articles that I had found most useful in my doctoral research on and early teaching of the Aeneid, and it did not reproduce any of the pieces reprinted in Commager's 1966 anthology, thus coming across to some as anti-Harvard in its selection, which was certainly not the intention.

I tried to balance this in the introduction, which attempted to give an outline of scholarship on the Aeneid in the twentieth century (up to 1988). There I suggested that for an outside observer it is difficult to separate the "Harvard" interpretation from "the characteristic concerns of U.S. (and other) intellectuals in these years," and especially "America's own imperialism" (5), and argued that such views related to the questioning of all institutions in the 1960s; Vietnam was certainly in my mind. Since then I have learnt that Wendell Clausen's views were generated in the late 1940s without real political reference (see Clausen 1995); that Michael Putnam's interpretation was wholly unconnected with American foreign policy;¹ and that all the major Harvard School pieces were conceived if not published before the United States' main engagement in the Vietnam War² (though the Cold War and the Korean War might have raised similar reflections in the 1940s and 1950s).

The other two Harvard authors (Brooks and Parry) were perhaps more politicized. Brooks had served in the Army Air Forces during World War II before his period teaching at Harvard in 1946–51, and in his later career in public service went on to be Assistant Secretary of the Army during the Vietnam War (1965–69...