Thank you for opening up Calvin’s Latin. Something you know but perhaps not many readers will is the way the 17th-century poet Lucy Hutchinson went through something like this trajectory in a very precise way: copying out those lines from book 6 from an early version by Denham in a notebook, then choosing to read Calvin in Latin when there were translations available and giving her own (‘That which some prattle of a hiden inspiration whereby the whole world thriues and flourisheth is not only vnsound but very prophane’ and beginning the Latin quotation; and alluding to Virgil in the very non- and partly anti-Virgilian poem Order and Disorder. Still room for a lot of debate about her uses of Virgil.
Fantastic comment David, thank you! I probably did once know that about Lucy Hutchinson, Denham, Virgil and Calvin, but if so I had forgotten it. She is certainly a great example of someone with an ambiguous/avoidant relationship to Virgil, of which there are quite a few at this period -- Payne Fisher, Cromwell's poet, also markedly avoids Virgil. (It's particularly obvious in his case because he's writing long hexameter poems which are filled with allusions, quotations and re-uses of other Latin poets, so the non-Virgilianism is very striking.) Shakespeare too, of course; not a Virgil fan.
Ezra Pound, in his ‘ABC of Reading’, retells a favourite anecdote of Yeats’s:
A plain sailor man took a notion to study Latin, and his teacher tried him with Virgil; after many lessons he asked him something about the hero.
Said the sailor: “What hero?”
Said the teacher: “What hero, why, Aeneas, the hero.”
Said the sailor: “Ach, a hero, him a hero? Bigob, I t’ought he was a priest.”
Thank you for opening up Calvin’s Latin. Something you know but perhaps not many readers will is the way the 17th-century poet Lucy Hutchinson went through something like this trajectory in a very precise way: copying out those lines from book 6 from an early version by Denham in a notebook, then choosing to read Calvin in Latin when there were translations available and giving her own (‘That which some prattle of a hiden inspiration whereby the whole world thriues and flourisheth is not only vnsound but very prophane’ and beginning the Latin quotation; and alluding to Virgil in the very non- and partly anti-Virgilian poem Order and Disorder. Still room for a lot of debate about her uses of Virgil.
Fantastic comment David, thank you! I probably did once know that about Lucy Hutchinson, Denham, Virgil and Calvin, but if so I had forgotten it. She is certainly a great example of someone with an ambiguous/avoidant relationship to Virgil, of which there are quite a few at this period -- Payne Fisher, Cromwell's poet, also markedly avoids Virgil. (It's particularly obvious in his case because he's writing long hexameter poems which are filled with allusions, quotations and re-uses of other Latin poets, so the non-Virgilianism is very striking.) Shakespeare too, of course; not a Virgil fan.