Virgil the Homerist

Besides the often-cited work of Bernard Knox and Viktor Pöschl, the scholarly writing and the pedagogical distinction of three people, Reuben Brower, J. P. Elder, and Cedric Whitman, were of paramount importance to me as background for writing The Poetry of the Aeneid.Beginning in the decade after the conclusion of World War II, Elder was a leader in applying the principles of New Criticism to Latin literature through a series of masterful interpretations of the great Roman poets for his students to emulate.Though I have done so since, I made no attempt at the end of my book to give the epic's climactic event an ethical setting, which is to say to place the poem's enraged protagonist in a position that would seem to be in negative dialogue with the preceding narrative.