![]() ![]() For Eliot, the Aeneid is an exemplary manifestation of the ‘common heritage of thought’ that informs his ideal of European civilisation – a civilisation whose underlying unity he holds as an article of faith. He qualifies as a classic because he wrote in one of the two languages – Latin and Greek – that Eliot describes as the ‘blood stream of European literature’, and because his work achieves the twin virtues of comprehensiveness and universality. He is ‘the consciousness of Rome and the supreme voice of her language’: a pivotal figure whose work reaches back to the pagan civilisation of ancient Greece and whose influence flows into the Christian era that succeeded his own. Virgil is thus a classic in a way that no English writer, not even Shakespeare, can claim to be – indeed, he is ‘the classic of all Europe’ – because his poetry is the mature expression of a mature civilisation. In Eliot’s account, a classic is more than just a work that has endured it has an importance that is at once literary and historical. Eliot’s 1944 lecture of the same name, in which Eliot considers Virgil as an example of a poet whose writing has transcended its historical moment. ![]() Its title – ‘What is a Classic?’ – alludes to T.S. Coetzee’s 2001 essay collection Stranger Shores begins with the text of a lecture he gave a decade earlier in Graz, Austria. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |