The Conversation of Gentlemen

Rereading Adam Parry's essay (1963) on "The Two Voices," I am struck by how deliberately it presents itself as an essay in belles lettres. There are no footnotes, not even line references. The first pages are the most brilliant. Parry takes a fragment from the ordinary texture of the Aeneid, less than two lines in the Italian catalogue, and submits them to a close reading out of which he develops an idea of the character of the whole. This is practical criticism at its best, with a sense of both the particular and the general, showing how a fine sense of detail can enhance a larger understanding.

There is another way in which the essay is old-fashioned (a term which I mean to carry no disparagement), and that is in the plangent eloquence of its prose, matching its Tennysonian idea of a poet majestic in his sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind. The tone is in striking contrast to Parry's other most famous article, "Have We Homer's Iliad?" (1966). There the answer is clear-cut: "Yes, absolutely." The difference between this and the half-light of the Virgil essay is partly because the two articles have different jobs to carry out: with Homer Parry is investigating a question of historical fact, with Virgil searching for a sensibility. But perhaps the difference between the character of the two epics has something to do with it too.

Parry did not claim that "the continual opposition of a personal voice" was an original idea. On the contrary, "all this I think is felt by every attentive reader of the poem." He seems to see himself less as staking out a controversial position than as exploring how a quality in the poem—which he claims we all recognize—comes to achieve its peculiar effect. But at times I find it hard to understand exactly what he is saying. Is this because of the subtlety of his mind (and the subtlety of Virgil's too, of course)? Or is that he has not thought all his ideas through fully? A bit of both, perhaps. In distinguishing between a "public voice" and a "personal voice," he seems to imply that the latter is the true voice. Is that indeed what he meant? Are the two voices in counterpoint or in conflict? One might think of Virgil as possessing a single voice that speaks in varied tones. Would that be another way of making Parry's point, or does he see the poem as more radically fractured?

In dealing with Aeneas and Dido, Parry does seem to me contradictory. He rightly denies that Aeneas is a cad who ratted on the girl he picked up on his Tunisian break, but then he appears to come back to more or less that position. Perhaps his most fascinating idea is that Virgil aestheticizes sorrow (a subject to which he would return in his essay on the fourth book of the Georgics [1972]). But here too I am not quite sure what he means. Parry says that Virgil invites us to look upon history with "the purer emotions of artistic detachment," which provide a "higher consolation." But is that really compatible with the bleak sense of tragedy and emptiness that he claims for the poem elsewhere? Maybe there should be an industry of optimist and pessimist readings of Adam Parry.

Rereading Clausen's "Interpretation" (1964) stirs another kind of puzzlement. It was published in a more conventional journal than Parry's piece, but it too is an elegant essay of broad scope, of a kind that we would be unlikely to find in a learned journal today. The puzzle is that it seems so unexceptionable. Was it really radical or controversial? Clausen himself later described the piece as "extreme; more right than wrong, yet in need of qualification." Extreme? True, it stresses the melancholy aspect of the poem, but that is mostly a matter of emphasis. Clausen shares some of Parry's feeling for style and tone, as when he finds the cadence strangely affecting in fortemque Gyan fortemque Cloanthum ("brave Gyas and...