F. A.

Swift - Milton Restored

"I believe Milton alone has had the hard fate of being murder'd by an editor in sixty years space." Bentley changes "darkness visible" to "a transpicuous gloom." He changes "utter darkness" to "outer darkness" (insisting on the biblical phrase, I suppose). Bentley changes "answered soon his bold compeer" to "answered sad his old compeer." He changes "to be weak is miserable" to "here to dwell is miserable." He changes "in bulk as huge" to "in bulk like that." He changes "receive thy new possessor" to "welcome thy new possessor." And so on. He changes "vanquished" to "'stonished," at which Pseudo-Milton exclaims that he is "so 'stonished, 'stonied, and stunned" by Bentley's emendations that he can hardly read them. And "If there were really any darkness in this passage, I am sure the Doctor has not rendered it visible by his note upon it." I'm really not sure what to say about this, except that it really is amazing that Bentley can have taken such liberties. If the whole thing had been a satire of Bentley, it could hardly have been better performed. Levine's suggestion, an admittedly improbable one, that Bentley may have had the last laugh by this means, is... tempting, I suppose. But either way the whole project seems to undermine everything else Bentley had done throughout his career; it's as if he had set out to show by a modern example just how absurd his treatment of the ancients had been.

Johnson - Preface to the Dictionary

"In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to the honour of my country." If it is poetry that immortalizes both authors and the heroes they describe, then there is a kind of foundational act of immortalizing that is performed in the act of producing a reliable dictionary: by this means, the very instruments by which the poets accomplish the art of immortalization are themselves preserved. There is a wonderful humility not just in the inherent thanklessness of the task, which Johnson well knows, but in his own recognition and perception of its actual greatness, and his desire to perform something great, regardless of whether it will be recognized by others as such. There is a kind of invisible heroism here, the unacknowledged but necessary steadiness and solidity of the plinth that supports the monument. Johnson's thoughts on language seem to reflect his thoughts on life more generally: it is impossible to preserve forever, yet always, always worth the effort of preserving yet a little longer. One must accept and yet not allow oneself to be defeated by the knowledge of its inevitable decay. As poets struggle against time and death to preserve moments, faces, objects that must disappear, so Johnson struggles to preserve the very language of signs by which the preservation of everything else is made possible. The work, as he knows, has every potential to be mechanical, dry, and triflingly obsessed with minutiae. But under Johnson's hand, at least so he hopes, it becomes after a manner its own kind of preservational art.

Boswell - Life of Johnson

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Boyle - Reply to Bentley

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Pope - Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus

A few things to note. First, the continual mention of "rust": the shield that is unfortunately cleaned off at Martin's birth; his father's intention to impart "rust" to him in his education; his father's general obsession with everything ancient, on account of its being ancient, without regard for the sense of it; Martin's interest in promoting architecture that, regardless of its present convenience, will make for admirable ruins in the sight of posterity. Second: attributions, as when Bentley's Horace and Milton are ascribed to Martinus, and also Gulliver's Travels and the Modest Proposal, and of course the contributed notes to the Dunciad. Third: a consistent interest in defining identity: Martin starts out searching for the "seat of the soul," trying out various organs and eventually concluding on the pineal gland; later he receives a fascinating letter which offers a Theseus' ship argument to explain how a physical body can maintain identity across time despite change, and which mentions explicitly that "the king" never dies; then there is the double-marriage episode, in which the question of identity of the Siamese twins is discussed at great length, along with, again, the problem of the seat of the soul (and also the problem of gender identity—cf. Annus Mirabilis, which I think was also ascribed to Scriblerus). The rust topic ties in with the ancient-modern controversy but recalls Pope's insistence upon not taking sides; it is not the ancientness of the ancients that should make them valuable. The identity topic is something quite wonderful; I suppose it probably is Arbuthnot's (as probably Annus Mirabilis was), but it winds up under Pope's name. The problem of what and where the soul is seems no more settled than it was when Aristotle assailed it.

Virgil - Aeneid

A few things worth remarking here: Lots of ecphrasis in the Aeneid. Aeneas and his men see the tale of the Fall of Troy depicted on the walls of the temple when they come to Carthage. When they come to Cumae to meet the Sibyl, they find the tale of Dedalus—the Minotaur story—on the walls of a shrine there. Then there's Aeneas' shield, which (unlike Achilles' snapshot-of-Greek-culture shield) is forward-looking, bespeaking not a moment but a telos. I'm not entirely sure what to say about this, except that Virgil seems very interested in the back-and-forth interplay between words and images. On this note, we might recall Burke's On the Sublime, where in the final chapter he mentions, as an example of the superior power of words over images, a line from book II of the Aeneid: Sanguine foedantem quos ipse sacraverat ignes [(polluting) with his blood fires which he himself had sanctified]. The point is that an image is incapable of showing that the altar was sanctified some hours previous by the same man now being slain there; words are capable of drawing this connection and heightening the poignancy of the scene. Thus Burke uses Virgil to call attention to poetry's superior affective power. If Hardison's "theory of praise" comes up, we can mention the Aedeid's having been interpreted as epideictic and allegorical in the middle ages and Renaissance. The poem turns out to be slightly problematic because Aeneas is not perfectly good; Xenephon's Cyropaedia ends up serving as a better model for didactic epic. Finally, there are also things to be said about Virgil's representation of the dead. They are shades, so Aeneas cannot interact with them directly; but they seem to retain their own personalities until they drink from Lethe (after a thousand years in Hades, whether suffering or in Elysium), whereafter they are reborn on earth. He mentions a theory that all things are permeated by mind, and that from mind comes life. I can't recall where this comes from in Greek philosophy.

Cicero - Somnium Scipionis

A fragment from the sixth book of De Re Publica; it was preserved via a commentary by Macrobius. It was popular during the middle ages. Unlike so many of Cicero's other works, it presents an argument against the pursuit of fame. The argument relies on a cosmic perspective, viewing the earth from a distance as a ball hanging in space (an idea developed by Thales and Pythagoras, not widely accepted, but believed by Aristotle and the Stoics). Limitations of both place and time make worldly fame a trivial matter; a man should concern himself with "the heavens" (eternal things) rather than with the problem of being remembered on earth. Samuel Johnson, who himself made arguments against the pursuit of fame in several Rambler essays, says he finds Cicero's argument here unconvincing and insincere. He then expands on it to add that not only limitations of time and place, but also of leisure and interest will prevent future generations from bothering to remember the dead. One interesting point is this: "remember that it is your body and not you that is mortal. For your true being is not shown in your outer appearance, but in your mind; the person to whom someone else can point with his finger is not your true self." The specific mention of "you" as interior, mental, and distinct from what can be deictically pointed to recalls Cicero's comment in his Defense of Archias that poetry is superior because it preserves the image of the soul rather than the image of the body. Regardless of the sincerity of Cicero's anti-fame rhetoric here, it is interesting that he is still concerned with the problem of the true self as distinguished from the visible self.

Pope - Dunciad

Actually this should have been the fourth and final version, "The Dunciad in Four Books" (the Variorum was only the second version). The original target was Theobald (the Shakespeare editor); the final one was Colley Cibber (poet laureate). The changes to the Cibber version (Dunciad B) increase the power of the "Anti-Christ of Wit" metaphor, and decrease the classical and Virgilian parody; the tone becomes more biblical and apocalyptic. Book I announces Cibber as the new king of Dulness. The games occur in Book II, which ends with the context of staying awake through Blackmore's poetry. Book III is the katabasis, where Cibber surveys formless poets waiting to be born (in print): "All crowd, who foremost shall be damn'd to Fame." In the end Cibber wakes; the dream is described as passing through the ivory gate—the false one. In the new fourth book, there is a nihilistic promise of the total obliteration of sense. In the throne-room of Dulness, science is chained, logic gagged, wit exiled, rhetoric tied up by sophism; morality is strangled by judges and bishops. The muses are in tenfold chains. Cibber is sleeping, as he slept through book III and had no part in book II. The three degrees of dulness are described, and professors of Oxford and Cambridge also appear, including Bentley, who insists that critics are the true champions of Dulness. At the very end, we seem about to receive a catalogue of those put to sleep by Dulness's final yawn—perhaps we partly do, but in a broad way, as physics, mathematics, sense, religion, and morality all expire in turn. Finally the reign of chaos returns; Dulness lets fall the curtain, "And universal darkness buries all." Basically we seem to have the alternative, nihilistic sequel to Paradise Lost here—not Paradise Regained but the triumph of the material, inane, immoral, vile, etc. There is not the sublimity of Milton's fallen archangel, whose propensities to evil seemed somehow to retain the stamp of his original nobility; instead the "heroes" of the Dunciad have everything in common with worms, mud, excrement. There is no epic or divine battle underway, only the slow subjugation of all good things, almost imperceptibly, to dullness. It's about as near a thing to epic as Pope seems to have felt his age could produce, and moreover, it's almost the only work in which he never does pull back from the nihilistic pessimism that seems to color but not quite characterize much of his other work. The bit about being "damned to fame" is also interesting; certainly the crowd pressing around the throne recalls The Temple of Fame, with its press of suppliants. One wonders whether the fame they are being damned to is a place in Pope's poem—a kind of temple of anti-fame. It's a very strange thing. If Pope were to find his own statue in the Temple, it seems his pillar would be graven with a relief of dunces: not Achilles or Aeneas, but Cibber, Blackmore, Bentley, performing grotesque games, and so on. There is a kind of tragic defeat in it; it is almost as if Pope set about to punish the age for not furnishing subjects worthy of a genuine epic poem, one he would have been happy to supply if it had been possible to do in good conscience.

Erasmus - In Praise of Folly

An encomiastic oration, following the classical rhetorical model. I suppose what's most interesting is the way Erasmus moves from what initially seems to be a mere friendly jest—praising folly for providing diversions and making men happy—into rather sharp satire—pointing out how foolish many philosophers, scientists, and biblical explicators are—and also into a kind of tragicomic resignation that almost approaches nihilism, since it turns out that life is utterly unlivable without folly, and indeed reason, by itself, can offer no real incentive for troubling to live at all; to be happy in this world is a kind of madness. It takes a fair amount of oblivious, naïve, forgetful optimism, a great deal of irrational and stupidly passionate attachment to life, to justify a man in just troubling to live. Wisdom, in fact, without any alloy of folly, ends up looking like the surest way to suicide. There are touches here that almost anticipate Voltaire and the problem of Panglossian optimism, and we can certainly see in Erasmus some hints toward Swift. A Tale of a Tub, and indeed pretty much all of Swift's satire, is confused in much the same way as In Praise of Folly: Swift is sometimes amiably in jest when he mocks follies, sometimes scathingly in earnest when he mocks idiocies, and sometimes seems to be personally conflicted (the question of whether the Houyhnhnms are gods or monsters comes to mind). In this way, like Erasmus, he is able to write about folly in a way that is actually rather serious, or at least carries serious moral weight—and which also requires a great deal of interpretation and reflection by the reader. These are not simple, straightforward satires in which a reader can simply "agree" with the author's viewpoint by laughing at his joke. The joke has to be interrogated, and the reader is left to determine how it should be taken.

Petrarch - Letter to Posterity

An incomplete work. Petrarch feigns humility in supposing that his name may be lost to the annals of history, but says he is writing in case his name has survived, since the people of the future might want to know who he was. He tends to couple boasting with humility by means of attributing praise of himself to other people, and doubts to himself (for instance when he says that others thought his speaking style clear and forceful, but he thought it weak). He then begins to tell his life story, but the text cuts off around 1350, some twenty years prior to the time at which he was writing. The notable thing here is the explicit effort to communicate with the as-yet-unborn, in parallel with the Letters to Ancients in which Petrarch had addressed the long-dead. In particular, what Petrarch wants to communicate is himself—hence the biography. A tombstone, a name, even his poetry is not enough; he wants posterity to know who he was. He clearly believes that text is, at least in some measure, capable of communicating the intimate self across time. He would like to join the ranks of Cicero, Vergil, etc. by becoming someone who, though dead, continues to influence and "speak" to the living.

Wotton - Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning

Argues that modern learning has advanced so far that the moderns actually know the ancients, as a general group, better than any single ancient knew that group; that is to say, the context of each period of ancient art has been studied in more detail now than ever in the past.

Aristotle - De Anima

Aristotle considers what a soul "is." He begins by reviewing former doctrines of the soul, some of which claim that it is a single element (fire, water), others that it is a composite of elements. Most or all agree that soul has the properties of a) movement, b) cognition, and c) immortality, though some (e.g. Anaxagoras) distinguish between soul and "mind" (where mind is the human intellectual function). Aristotle himself finds it strange that no one yet has discussed the problem of why soul and body are connected, and what makes a particular body proper to a soul. He believes that the soul probably is not divisible from the body (though he allows that some parts of it might be). He defines soul as the form of a natural body potentially having life within it; soul is to body as sight is to the eye, or as the shape-of-wax is to the wax. He proceeds to examine different faculties of perception, and then motive power. This is a useful overview of the philosophical doctrines of the soul up to Aristotle's time, and the different ways in which it was viewed: what it was composed of, what its particular qualities were, and so on. It seems strange that at no point does Aristotle address the idea of the "shade" or image that was supposed to travel to Hades after death—though perhaps that part of the treatise has been lost. He does say that mind is "impossible to destroy," but "mind" seems to be something like the faculty for cognition—it is not the mind that thinks, he says, but a man who thinks by means of his mind. In short, there seems to be nothing in De Anima to indicate anything like a personal afterlife for the individual self. The soul, in Aristotle's view, is closely connected with the body, and most of its operations depend upon the body, either for their origination or for their effect.

Aristotle - Rhetoric

Aristotle's Rhetoric seems almost to be a reply to the challenge Socrates gives in Plato's Phaedrus—that of developing rhetoric into a true techne by describing all the possible types of argumentative methods, and all the possible types of audiences, and explaining systematically how each should be applied. One of my early arguments to explain Aristotle's presence in The Temple of Fame was that he was there as a rhetorician. So I suppose we'll talk about Pope and rhetoric here, and bring up Elder Olson, and the fact that resurrecting Pope after the 19th century required making him a "rhetorician," because what his works no longer fit under the heading of "poetry" as it was understood after Wordsworth. I'm particularly interested in Pope's methods of developing an ethos through his various personae (and his letters and portraits). Much of Pope's authority rests on his methods of developing ethos, from the Essay on Criticism onward (and perhaps even in the Pastorals).

Gay - Trivia

As Henry Power notes, this book is partly a mock-imitation of the Georgics, and partly a mock-imitation of Horace's Ars Poetica. Its similarities to the Georgics suggest a decline in civilization and a parallel decline in art, as "heavenly signs" are reduced to shop signs and street signs, and as seasonal changes become notable not in the weather itself but in the fashions to be seen in the streets—as the dangers to be avoided are no longer epic but trivial (not crop failures or natural disasters, but soiled garments, a wet wig, a stolen pocket watch). Gay's jesting imitation of Ovid at the book's conclusion, where he hopes to be apotheosized (not as a star—a heavenly sign—but as an ad on a street-sign) suggests a fear or at least a feeling that to be "immortal" in the modern, commercial world is impossible, since literature no longer focuses on changeless things (weather, seasons, nature, morality) but instead focuses on transitory things (fashions like ladies' shoes, technologies like coaches, laws of etiquette). Henry Power notes that Gay is pretty openly comparing himself to a prostitute ("the Art of Walking the Streets") and suggesting thus that poetry, in becoming commercialized and consumer-focused, has become a form of prostitution, a selling of oneself for pay. Basically, when we talk about Gay we will be talking about the way the classics provide a model that on the one hand must be reckoned with, if one means to produce great art, yet on the other hand cannot possibly be reproduced on equal footing, both because changes in culture have made classical simplicity impossible (which is both a blessing and a curse, as was recognized by writers on Homer even at the time, and as Putnam mentions in discussing Horace's "sophisticated" odes) and because anything produced after the classical period is inevitably belated (see Bloom). The Scriblerians, in their characteristic texts, assail the problem of the impossibility of rivaling the classics by announcing—and performing—the problem.

Shakespeare - Sonnets

Basically I'm interested in the two forms of immortality that appear in the early part of the sequence, in the first fourteen poems that encourage the young man to have children—the only defense against "Time's scythe" (12)—and in the next six poems, which promise to immortalize the young man through verse ("So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee" 18). Apart from these—12 and 18—we might note Sonnet 55 ("Not marble nor the gilded monuments...") and 104, which addresses future readers: "hear this, thou age unbred: / Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead." This is one of a few places where we see poetry equated with progeny, though usually this requires that the poetry be produced by the one to be immortalized. Perhaps in some sense the act of poetic production by one man, about another, may be seen as producing a kind of hybrid offspring, combining their features, and allowing them a kind of unified immortality, a one-ness not unlike that which Donne tries to describe in some of his Sonnets.

Bentley - Dissertations Upon the Epistles of Phalaris...

Bentley sets out in his usual pedantic and arrogant way to prove that the epistles of Phalaris and the fables of Aesop are not early Greek texts, but late forgeries.

Boyle - Epistles of Phalaris

Boyle, age seventeen, working with the Christ Church wits, puts together a new edition of the Epistles of Phalaris. He does not insist that they are genuine, though he does indicate that he would prefer to.

The Frenzy of Renown (Braudy)

Braudy's chapter on Cicero posits that a lack of belief in an afterlife led to an increased desire for worldly fame in Rome. He fixes on Cicero as distinct from other figures who sought to achieve fame through established practices (e.g. imagines); Cicero instead sought fame through language. His authority proceeded not from his social status but from his "self"; his status is ostensibly derived from merit rather than birth. This would later make him an ideal model for the humanists.

Rereading the Renaissance (Quillen)

Carol Quillen makes a case study of Petrarch's reading habits, specifically his reading of Augustine, in order to investigate the complexities of early humanist reading practices. She describes humanism itself as a complex variety of textual practices (reading and writing) geared toward mediating past and present. She claims that Petrarch uses Augustine's reading practices as a model for his own, and an implicit justification for recovering classical models within a Christian context. But Petrarch's reading practices are contradictory, as they involve both identification with the text/author and also questioning of authorial intention. This is, in some ways, just another way of describing the humanist split, which Quillen references at the very beginning of her book: mediation inevitably requires both identification and distancing, and requires both the assumption that authorial intention matters and the assumption that it does not. What is perhaps most interesting is that the problem does not seem to arise only with the advent of humanism; Augustine himself described a kind of "intentional fallacy" in biblical exegesis, which at once relied upon the authority of the Bible as a text, and denied that the intention of its authors dictated its meaning. The problem ultimately is Derridean: text is absence, but is also an endeavor to render presence from absence. Quillen has been charged with some major omissions, such as failing to consider that Augustine's reading method is philosophical and not poetical, and that Petrarch's major aims were poetic and not philosophical; in other words, Quillen seems to have tried to bring the two more into line than they really were, in their reading practices and motives. The complaint seems justified, and I should probably note that the most useful thing I have found in Quillen is her bibliography.

Dryden - Absalom and Achitophel

Charles II as King David, his illegitimate son James of Monmouth as Absalom; the Earl of Shaftesbury as Achitophel. I suppose my interest here will be in the curious use of Miltonic allusions. Achitophel is clearly presented as a Satan type, wielding rhetoric to corrupt Absalom. But Achitophel compares David to Satan, having fallen "like the Prince of Angels from his height" due to the Popish Plot. The general tone of the poem seems rather theocratic; Dryden disparages democracy, and seems to hail David as a god-appointed king. So the rebellion against him is presented as a kind of anarchic rejection of God; indeed one of the arguments for why the king's power should be accepted is that citizens, like Adam, naturally consign their offspring to the laws they themselves accept; otherwise how could Adam's sin have made all his descendents guilty? Although Dryden takes a rather traditional, royalist view, his poem still reflects growing concerns about what the duties are of a king to his citizens, and by extension of a God to his creations. I would argue that the comparison is particularly problematic in the poem's opening, which describes Charles II's promiscuousness in terms so lofty as to read rather like satire, as he "scatter'd his Maker's image through the land."

Cicero - Pro Archia Poeta

Cicero is defending the poet Archias' right to Roman citizenship. He does something unusual in presenting a speech that is chiefly epideictic rather than forensic; its persuasiveness relies almost wholly on two things, the ethos of the speaker (Cicero) and, most prominently, the value and virtue of poetry. Cicero gives two reasons for valuing poetry: it offers undying fame to great men, and it prompts aspiring men to do noble deeds in pursuit of such fame. Cicero says the best men are motivated by the desire for renown (not riches or power, but fame which is associated more directly with merit), and points out that great men would be forgotten if it weren't for poets like Homer who preserved their memory in song. Cicero also mentions that he himself seeks to reap an "undying memory throughout the whole world" (contrast this with the Dream of Scipio), and mentions having asked Archias to write an epic about him. He also notes that poetry is superior to statuary, since statuary preserves the image of the body, but poetry preserves the image of the soul. This last point is of special interest for a couple of reasons. First, it emphasizes the importance of the debate about monument versus song; since there is nothing about the subject matter that seems to require any mention of statuary, Cicero's choice to mention it suggests that the two ideas are expected to be closely connected in the minds of his listeners (an enthymeme where the assumption is that there is a high regard for monument). Second, Cicero focuses on the special ability of song to preserve the interior self. Cicero's belief that language can paint a "portrait of the soul" may explain his heavy reliance on it in his efforts at self-preservation; the special power of language is that of signifying the invisible, and fame is strongly associated with what is seen (Braudy makes a strong case for the connection, and Roach brings it up as well; there is also enlightenment/knowing, Greek seeing/knowing, etc.). Language makes it possible to "see" the interior; it makes souls accessible to one another; it is the vehicle for intimacy. Note also that it was Petrarch who happened to find the Defense of Archias, even before he found the Letters to Atticus.

Cicero - De Oratore

De Oratore the oldest surviving Latin dialogue; a large part of the text was lost until 1421 when a manuscript was discovered containing all of De Oratore, Brutus, and Orator. The text is modeled on Plato's dialogues (and is probably the earliest Roman text to follow Plato's example so closely), but Elaine Fantham has noted that the model serves quite different purposes for Cicero than for Plato: Cicero rejects the question-and-challenge method (which would cast doubt on received moral beliefs), and he takes a positive view of both politics and rhetoric. Fantham argues that De Oratore is more successful as an exemplification of Roman humanitas—courtesy and hospitality—than as a defense of rhetoric. In describing the setting for the dialogue, Cicero has Scaevola suggest that the group begin their conversation under a plane tree which strikes him as "just like that other plane tree whose shade Socrates sought" (in the Phaedrus), "which seems to me to have grown not so much because of that little stream described there as owing to Plato's own words." This is the first but not the only time that Cicero alludes to the plane tree in the Phaedrus (he does so again in De Legibus), and in both cases he calls special attention to the status of the tree as fictional, and implies that because it is fictional (is text), it exists not in one place and at one time, but always and everywhere. This view may actually be contrasted somewhat with Socrates' view that text is merely a device for reminding, and cannot convey knowledge. Cicero, here and elsewhere, seems committed to a view that grants text a great deal of power to create and to preserve. We might even consider his use of the plane tree (both times) as a "strong misreading" of Plato, in Bloom's sense, and consider whether "anxiety of influence" is a topic that applies to other genres of text besides poetry and literature. I also find this text interesting because of the Simonides anecdote, which Cicero uses explicitly in order to associate memory with place and visualization. He offers a brief account of the mnemonic technique of the "memory palace," as well.

Pope - Windsor Forest

Dedicated to Lord Granville, a poet and early patron of Pope, who served Queen Anne as Secretary for War and later as Treasurer. Originally, Pope wrote Windsor-Forest as a pastoral poem, but Lord Granville asked him to turn it into an encomium in praise of the Treaty of Utrecht (a series of treaties between several European states which helped end the war of the Spanish Succession). Oxford and Bolingbroke had been involved in this treaty. Throughout Windsor-Forest, there is an implied equation between the abuse of Man's power over nature and the abuse of his power over his fellow men: kings who ruled by "savage laws" were tyrants over the environment as well as over their subjects. I probably will read "Windsor-Forest" in connection with Guardian 61, against cruelty to animals, and the Essay on Man, which commands that one "take ev'ry creature in of ev'ry kind." Mack points out in his biography of Pope how strange it is to see the particular epic/classical pathos that Pope invokes applied to a pheasant; I would add that it resembles his description of the slaughtered lamb in the Essay on Man (and possibly acts of subjugation of nature in the Pastorals). We might note, however, that his stance is not entirely modern; Cicero also expressed disgust at cruelty to animals. We might also note Quintero's argument, detailed elsewhere.

Descartes - Meditations

Descartes attempts to undermine traditional skepticism by proving that despite our limitations, we are capable of knowing some things with certainty; he then endeavors to lay the groundwork for human knowledge on the one most basic and indubitable certainty that he cannot doubt: his own existence—cogito, ergo sum. He concludes that the mind could not have ideas unless they came from without, and that the idea of a perfect being must come from a perfect being; therefore God must exist and, being perfect, cannot be a deceiver. From here it becomes possible to prove the existence of the physical world and of all "clear and distinct ideas." The points to focus on here are probably Descartes' debts to ancient thought, including Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle had posited that the basic properties of the soul were thought, motion, and immortality. For Descartes, the most basic property of the soul is thought; but as in Aristotle, the soul is supposed to cause the body to move (via fluids in the pineal gland, affected by a force like gravitation). Descartes also sets out to prove, like Plato in the Phaedo, that the body and the soul must be distinct. The senses are liable to err (as Socrates says, they are false witnesses), but "clear and distinct" ideas must be true (much like Plato's perfect forms). He takes the Platonic view that the soul can exist apart from the body, rather than the Aristotelian view that the soul, although perhaps partly distinct from the body, is inextricably connected with it. The basic point here is that Descartes is often credited with having almost invented the notion of the "self" through the process of the Cogito; but the self he describes seems very similar to that described by Plato in the Phaedo (which also attacks skepticism). In fact, the whole method of attempting to doubt everything is rather Platonic, like a dialogue against an unusually hostile or skeptical interlocutor. Descartes' notion of the soul seems to be a rather classical one.

Pope - Imitations of Horace

Eleven poems, written in the mid 1730s. The epistle to Fortescue is particularly memorable: Fortescue advises him not to write, but he finds this impossible. He mocks the "gun, drum, trumpet," etc.; he concludes dramatically with a claim that "yes, while I live, no rich or noble knave / shall walk the world, in credit, to his grave." Note some inversions from Horace: the horse falling instead of the man falling from his horse, for instance. "Sober Advice" is the obscene one, which Pope denied having written. There is an imitation half by Swift (the mice). There is the delightful "half beau half sloven if I stand / my wig all powder, and all snuff my band." There is also, of course, "To Augustus," where the poet complains of the preference for "rust" and asks how old a poet must be before he can be regarded—a hundred years? He mentions that Shakespeare wrote for money, not glory, yet is now highly regarded. This really is a remarkable piece, since in its stance it almost falls on the "modern" side of the ancient-modern controversy, rejecting any favoritism for ancient authors on account of their ancient-ness—and yet it is, of course, after a manner, actually an "ancient" poem itself. The point, perhaps, is that Horace was also a "modern" in his day, and moderns may someday prove "ancients," too. At least, Pope certainly seems to sometimes hope so, though he also sometimes doubts. If the topic of the Horatian imitations comes up in a general way, "To Augustus" would be a good poem to focus on. Also note the Epilogues to the Satire, the first of which ends with the dramatic "not to be corrupted is the shame" bit; in the second one Pope is told to refrain from naming his subjects, and so we get general satire set to "souse on all the kind." These I think are two of Pope's liveliest poems, and really so are most of the Horatian satires. He has all the art and elegance at his disposal that he ever had before, but much less reserve and devotion to "correctness"—there is not just wit but real vigor and personality here.

Commerce with the Classics: Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts (Grafton)

First chapter examines libraries and books of 15th-century humanists; other chapters focus on four humanists: Alberti, Pico della Mirandola, Budé, Kepler. Grafton discusses humanism as an effort to "wake the dead." New philology demanded a historical consciousness, construing the text as a product of the past; but humanist interpretation also sought contemporary, moral readings. Readings were conditioned by accompanying marginal notes, compendia, etc. Note the Renaissance's attempts at Roman-style libraries, in terms of organization of texts and the inclusion of statuary. I need to actually read this book, but in the meantime I think the best I can do with it is to discuss it along with Levine's Battle of the Books. Grafton's most interesting point on this topic may be that the paradox of humanism is not a Renaissance phenomenon, but seemingly a universal one: the Alexandrians ran into the same problems in their efforts to "wake the dead" through scholarship that Renaissance humanists did. Hence we can talk about Horace, belatedness, and Bloom's Anxiety of Influence.

Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Flower)

Flower discusses the use of imagines, or "ancestor masks," in the late Roman Republic. These masks were kept in aristocratic households to represent dead family members, but they were not death masks; they were wax masks made during a person's lifetime. They had no connection with magic and were not believed to be inhabited by spirits, but it was traditional for them to be worn in funeral processions for the family, where the wearers would perform as the figures depicted by the masks. Only office-holding ancestors were represented by imagines. Cicero, as a "new man" (novus homo) did not have access to the prestige and promise of memorialization associated with aristocratic funeral practices such as imagines and funeral orations (also available only to nobles). Part of his drive to equate greatness with merit rather than with high birth or social status may have derived from his desire to be remembered, and the inaccessibility of traditional memorial devices. (Braudy thinks so.)

Virgil - Georgics

Four books, discussing the care and tillage of earth, the care of trees and vines, the care of herds and flocks, and the care of bees. Advice about tending plants and animals is interspersed with pessimistic gnomic comments about the trend of all things toward degeneration (Hesiodic gold to iron) and death. The first and third books end on very dark notes (storms and horrors at the death of Caesar and the ensuing wars; death and disease in flocks, wild animals, men). The second book ends with a kind of lament for the lost golden age, in comparison with the iron age of labor and war; the fourth book ends with the myth of Orpheus, to explain how bees can be generated out of a carcass. There is a heavy focus throughout all the books on the laboriousness of cultivating the land, and on war (the death of Caesar, the rise of Augustus, the battles of bulls, the wars of bees). The third book, on herds and flocks, is the one where Virgil most plainly sets out the Georgics as a path to fame: he echoes Ennius' alleged claim to need no funeral, as he will virum volitare per ora—"fly on the lips of men" or "fly past the faces of men." He describes the poem itself as a marble temple, and "in Parian marble shall stand statues breathing life" (Pindaric echoes are evident here), and sculpted with gold and ivory on the doors, and bronze columns, depicting battles and conquered nations. Caesar will hold the shrine. In the games, he says, "I myself will award the prizes." He says that he will "bear [Caesar's] name in story through as many years as Caesar is distant from the far-off birth of Tithonus." At the very end of the last poem, he signs his name ("In those days I, Virgil... toyed with shepherd's songs") and echoes the first line of the first Eclogue. So if Horace is echoing Pindar by proclaiming the superiority of poetry to monument, Virgil is echoing him even more directly by building a work of poetic architecture, with "statues breathing life": instead of comparing his work with that of sculptors and claiming it as superior, he describes his work as a kind of living sculpture. And the signature is a nice touch to make sure that the name of Caesar, which he will carry down through the ages, will not go alone.

Pope - Moral Epistles

Four epistolary poems. "Epistle to Cobham" is on the knowledge and characters of men (they differ from each other and also from themselves, yet each has a "ruling passion"). "Epistle to a Lady" is on the characters of women (for Martha Blount). "Epistle to Bathurst" is on the use of riches. "Epistle to Burlington" is also on the use of riches. Allegedly, these were supposed to comprise part of a larger work, to which the four books of the Essay on Man would also have belonged. The "Epistle to Cobham" is interesting in its frank rejection of Aristotle's claim that man is essentially rational; if you try to define a man by reason, "it may be reason, but it is not Man." The secret essence, like life itself, is lost in the act of dissection—another little dig at science. Something irrational is perhaps "the cause of most we do." There is perhaps a touch of debt to Erasmus here, but anyway the denial of Aristotle is rather bold, and remarkable in itself, since even today we are still arguing about man as a rational creature. The ultimate focus on a "ruling passion" is, from a modern standpoint, somewhat doubtful; but at least the setup is remarkably perceptive. This seems to be customary with Pope—he comes just to the verge of an almost nihilistic modernism or even postmodernism, and then somehow he backtracks and sets up the idol of some rationalistic Enlightenment idea. It happens frequently in the Essay on Man. He wants to be perfectly sincere and also produce a moral message, but the two aims seem to be incompatible. Unwilling to give up either, he starts one way and concludes the other. As to the other epistles, the one to Martha Blount is remarkable mostly in its final description of the "last best work" of nature being "a softer man"—a confusion of contradictions (always delightful to Pope), mingling feminine and masculine traits. The epistle to Bathurst attacks both greedy and prodigal men, and finally celebrates Bathurst; it includes the line "Who builds a church to God, and not to fame, / Will never mark the marble with his name"—an interesting thought, coming from a man who marked everything with his name that he reasonably could. And the epistle to Burlington is the delightful description of Timon's villa, with its symmetries and fountains and ridiculous long paths, and the feast in which one is "tantalized in state." Sometimes the Epistle to Addison is included in the series, which is the one about coins. On the whole it seems to be serious, except for that line about how antiquaries value the coin, "but the rust adore"—something Pope is always ridiculing, as, for instance, in the Scriblerus Memoirs.

John Tillotson - Sermons

From Tillotson, I read a series of four essays on the immortality of the soul, as demonstrated, he says, by both reason and revelation. Tillotson aims to show, first, what it means for Christ to have "appeared," conquered death, and revealed immortality. He "appeared" insofar as he was sent by the Father, came voluntarily, and was manifest in human flesh, according to prophecy. He conquered death insofar as he died but then rose from the dead, demonstrating his power both over death and over the Devil (who brought death into the world by tempting Adam and Eve). He revealed immortality by demonstrating that a human being could be resurrected, although the idea of the immortality of the soul had been suspected or believed by both heathens and Jews throughout prior history. Tillotson aims to show that the soul is immortal, not by sure proofs (these, he says, are impossible in this case), but by an accumulation of reasons to find immortality probable. He offers a number, several of which amount to the argument that God would not be just, life would be unbearable, no one would care about fame or posterity, morality would be meaningless—if people do not have immortal souls. Immortality is consistent with our other beliefs; the alternative is inconsistent with our other beliefs. So it's more probable that we are immortal. (Animals may also have souls, and probably do, but since their souls are limited to sensation, and are not intellectual, they are bound to material things, and will probably be annihilated along with the material world at the Apocalypse.) There are references to Aristotle and Demosthenes here (the soul perhaps being made of round atoms). Tillotson does not discuss the mind-body problem or ask how an immaterial soul can move matter. I suppose the main interesting point here is his idea that men's desire for fame is a proof of immortality, since men would not care about being remembered after death unless they believed that they would still exist after death. Wordsworth makes almost an identical argument in his Essays Upon Epitaphs. The argument can probably be traced back to Plato's Symposium, where Socrates says that the search for love is actually the search for immortality—that men seek beauty and all good things in order to be more nearly connected with universals and with eternity, and that the desire for fame (like the desire for offspring) is the search for immortality—to be immortal in the world through one's works, like Solon through his laws.

Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Lattimore)

Greek culture offered a religious system that did not explicitly promise immortality of the soul. At the time of Homer, Greek religion appears to have depicted the soul or psyche as an "image" or eidolon of the self, which, at death, escaped from the body and departed to Hades. It was not exactly material, since it was invisible, but it was generally seen to possess material properties. Some, but not all Greek religious views portrayed the soul as retaining personal identity. Even Greek belief in the immortality of the psyche was neither widespread, nor clear, nor very strong. Cicero's Tusculan Dispuations suggest that this was even more true in Rome: some systems claimed that the soul escaped the body at death, others that it expired within the body. There are examples of tombstones that explicitly tell the "passerby" that there is no afterlife, and many stones make an explicit point of telling the passerby that it is they, the stones, and not the dead, who are "speaking." In fact, it is rarely the dead who "speak."

Milton - Comus

I assume that the section of "Comus" that Dr. Rumrich wanted me to focus on was the section on the relationship between virtue—especially chastity—and "immortality." Basically, Milton adopts Plato's view, as expressed in the Phaedo, that the wise man's aim is to separate the soul from the body, and that virtue is a turning toward the things of the spirit and away from the things of the flesh; this allows the soul, at the time of death, to part from the body and ascend to the heavenly abodes. He also adopts Plato's view that a soul more attached to material things, including the body, is more likely to be trapped in the world as a phantom or ghost. I'm not sure how to square this with Milton's "mortalism." It certainly seems that the soul, though entwined with the body during life, is capable of disentangling itself and becoming, at death, autonomous. His choice to represent virtue in a pagan setting, among pagan deities, is certainly interesting: the focus is on virtuous attitudes and habits, and immortality here has nothing to do with salvation via Christ. It is also worth noting the adaptation of Horace's 1.22. Horace had made it unclear whether virtue was really being praised, or rather poetry. The problem had puzzled translators, and most imitators took a route not unlike Milton's, preferring to focus on virtue (one early commentator on Comus praises Milton for having so greatly improved on Horace's ode). We could talk about 1.22 and the possibility of interpreting the "safety" of the narrator as associated with immortality of text: he continues to say the same thing, Lalage, wherever he goes, regardless of danger or clime. There is no particular evidence that Milton saw a relationship between chastity and textual immortality, but if we do see Horace's ode as hinting at this, then it is interesting that Milton transforms literary immortality into literal immortality of the soul.

Johnson - Rambler

I suppose I'll focus here on Johnson's several attacks on "fame." He looks at Scipio's Dream and finds Cicero's argument against fame to be both insincere and unpersuasive, and yet he goes on to expand on the same argument: not only is fame a futile pursuit because one can only be remembered by a small number of persons due to the limitations of space and time, says Johnson, one can also only be remembered by those who have the curiosity and the leisure for remembering one, when of course most people's time is taken up with more practical pursuits (the price of bread). All this is in Rambler 118; in Rambler 143 Johnson continues by explaining how miserable a man becomes if he makes celebrity necessary to his happiness, since there is nothing easier for others than to withhold praise. Finally the man is forced to rely upon the judgment of posterity; thus one seeks "to conceal his own unimportance from himself." But every man is small and unimportant, and anyone who is remembered must replace someone else, now to be forgotten. Rambler 203 continues in a similar vein. As in his writings generally, Johnson surveys the topic of fame with more sobriety and self-reflective honesty than most anyone before his time, or many after. He is able to discuss and explain the reasons why a man ought to be indifferent to fame, and at the same time to confess the near impossibility of complying with that "ought." It is this kind of writing from Johnson that allows his prose works to count as poetry after a fashion—Shelley's fashion, we might say—insofar as they do not so much propose arguments (though they pretend to) as they present a universal condition and paradox of human life, the impossible desire for immortality, which defies yet cannot be defeated by reason. Johnson's own particular horror of death may bear somewhat on this topic. We might also bring up Johnson's comments on biography and on fiction. In both cases he advocates attention to the particular, the individual, the accessible, and he approves of the tendency in modern fiction to depict scenes less fantastic and more real, which require the author to have knowledge of the world and not only of books.

Swift - The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit

I suppose we'll comment on the very opening lines, in which the author describes having something very "material" in his head that he needs to get out, as he can no longer "contain" it (his italics); and therefore he is looking for a suitable title for his work. This is leading up to the joke about pretensions to epistolarity, but it also seems to relate to what he says elsewhere about the "spirit" which, having been worked up by one means or another, strives to "ejaculate" itself; and from this process come fanatical orations. It seems clear that this same sort of egress-seeking "spirit" is the "very material" something that the author can "contain" no longer. Only he is not going to deliver it by oration; instead he will deliver it as a text. I assume this was Dr. Rumrich's point in telling me to add this text to my field-exam list: Swift asserts here a) the materiality of the spirit, b) the power of the author to expel the spirit through language, and c) the power of text to contain or convey that spirit. Of course, as this is a satire, one hesitates to take these assertions too seriously; but after all they do corroborate things he says elsewhere, and of course they also corroborate Milton's apparent view.

Sterne - Tristram Shandy

I think I'll focus here on Book 1, chapter 22, where Sterne is still putting off describing Uncle Toby. He spends a couple of paragraphs explaining, though, that while he has been digressing and talking about other things (including various topics of conversation between his father and uncle), he has also been subtly developing Toby's character. "In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time." He then begins eulogizing digressions, which "are the sunshine;—they are the life and soul of reading." In one sense, Sterne uses digressions jokingly, and Tristram Shandy appears a little to resemble A Tale of a Tub for that reason; there is certainly some satire going on. But whereas Swift is really attacking the inept and foolish proliferation of digressions and obsession with minutiae, Sterne is only poking playful fun, and clearly recognizes that digressions can be used very effectively. They are the little touches that add lifelike-ness to his portraits. For particular examples we might mention Tristram's father reaching across to his pocket because his wig is in his other hand, or Toby's crushed wig, or Toby's saving the fly rather than killing it. As a broader example, we might talk about how much time Sterne spends talking about Toby's "Hobby-Horse," and how he says that in many cases a man may be known best by his hobby horse. This illustrates the move from public to private, from exterior to interior, from political to personal. Tristram Shandy, unlike the early novels of Defoe or Richardson or Fielding, and even unlike A Tale of a Tub, has no plot at all: there are only episodes and characters. What Watt says in his chapter on Fielding, about plot structure and character development being inversely correlated, seems to apply here: Sterne's characters are more vivid and lively because they are not made to serve any particular dramatic function. They are presented like a book of snapshots.

Isaac Barrow - Sermons

I wasn't able to find any sermons on the soul as such, or the afterlife (some volumes were not available at the library, so I should look for these again sometime). Instead I focused on Barrow's sermons on two topics: Christ as the "Savior of all mankind" (a phrase Barrow repeats incessantly), and the Doctrine of Universal Redemption. These are similar topics; in each case, the focus is chiefly on explaining and demonstrating the justice or fairness of God's decrees with regard to salvation. In the sermons on Christ as universal Savior, Barrow aims to show that salvation has been made available to everyone, that there are no obstacles so great that a man cannot (in theory) overcome them and attain salvation, and that there is no injustice in God's having placed different people in different circumstances. Barrow seems to assert that all people, of all cultures, whether or not they have ever actually heard the doctrine of salvation, are capable of being saved. He does not say much about this (he mentions that some future sermon might address the question of the salvation of e.g. Socates or Epictetus), but he does offer the useful parallel of children who die in infancy, before they are old enough to "accept" Christ as their savior, or even to understand what sin and salvation are. In some ways, his explanations are highly unsatisfactory, since he harps a great deal on how salvation is a "mystery" and must not be pried into too much, and his "evidence" consists almost wholly of quotations from the Bible, mostly the New Testament—mostly the letters of Paul. Like Descartes and other philosophers, he also occasionally offers arguments from moral sense: since we know it would be wrong for God to treat people differently, and since God is all-good, it follows that he does not treat people differently. (This involves, however, explanations based on God's precognition: if He can foresee that no good will come of offering salvation to a certain people—if he foresees that they will refuse it—then He is justified in withholding the revelation.) We might, perhaps, mention De Doctrina Christiana by way of comparison. Milton also insists that God did not decree anything absolutely, because that would be "unworthy" of Him; that is, because it would have been wrong for God to predestine any man to perdition, He cannot have done so. Therefore all men are capable of salvation, notwithstanding which, God has known for all time which men would be saved. (See Boethius, perhaps, for comments on how this works; Milton's ideas are similar.) God "has omitted nothing which might suffice for universal salvation." These ideas are not solely Milton's, either, of course. The point is that the project of "justifying" God's ways seems to be a general project at this period. Theological discourse has become curiously legalistic, as people become more concerned about their rights and about the political roles of citizens and kings. The relationship between God and his creations ends up therefore being described in terms that resemble those describing a king and his people, and it becomes necessary to explain just what is "owed" on either hand, and what the duties are of God toward man, as well as (the more traditional, classical topic) of man toward God.

Swift - A Proposal for Correcting...

I'd like to discuss Swift's "Proposal" in connection with the episode about the Struldbrugs in Gulliver's Travels. They are immortal, but not ageless; they grow increasingly decrepit with time, and their language is so changeable that within a couple of generations they can't even be understood. "The Language of this Country being always upon the Flux, the Struldbrugs of one Age do not understand those of another, neither are they able after two hundred Years to hold any Conversation (farther than a few general words) with their Neighbours the Mortals, and thus they lye under the Disadvantage of living like Foreigners in their own Country." This description strongly recalls both Swift's discussion of language and literature in his "Proposal," and his discussion of the fate of "immortal" books in his Tale. That is: Gulliver imagines what kind of immortality he wants Struldbrugs to have, and it is much like the immortality (and perpetual, changeless perfection) that Swift wants for books and language in his "Proposal." Homer and Plutarch should be able to converse. But the reality for the Struldbrugs is much like what Swift describes in the Tale: insofar as they survive at all, (modern) books lose all value and ability to communicate. In short, immortality should be desirable, but the immortality that is available is a worthless one. This section emphasizes, once again, the importance Swift places on immortality, and how he associates it with language and communication.

Pope - Temple of Fame

I'm probably still making this the centerpiece of my dissertation, because it branches off in all the directions I want to go. If asked about it, I guess I'd have to describe what exactly I plan to be doing, in order to explain why this poem should serve as the centerpiece. It just seems to me to be the most explicit piece of poetry, next to Horace's Ode 3.30, to illustrate the paradox of preserving via art (art is static and limited; the thing preserved is by nature animated, changing, full of potentiality and possibility) and the tensions between classical and modern modes of preservation (the monolithic versus the fragmentary, universal versus particular, which apply even if the "monoliths" of the ancients are also texts), as well as the immediate controversy over the relative authoritative status of texts versus critics. There was of course always something a bit dubious about claims to literary immortality, even in authors as self-assured as apparently Ennius was (he said he needed no funeral since he would live on the lips of men), but it's in Pope's own time period that the myth really breaks down. We can see the Romantics standing in the rubble of it, and perhaps trying to build it back up on some new model. In order to write a dissertation we'll need to look at the various factors that contribute to the event, though they're pretty well documented. But the point I'm chiefly making is that it is an event, that the birth of celebrity in some ways coincides with the death of classical fame, and The Temple of Fame reflects the moment of collapse.

Pope - Iliad

I'm tempted to talk about Mack rather than Pope here, and to compare Mack's introduction to the Twickenham edition of the Iliad to Levine's description in The Battle of the Books. For Levine, comparing Pope with Bentley and other scholars, Pope appears to be almost a hack; for Maynard Mack, comparing Pope to his predecessors in translation and to the general scholarly practices of the period, and taking Pope's resources and aims into account, he is a sincere and ardent poet performing a great work. I suppose part of the disparity has to do with Mack's agenda of reclaiming Pope; Levine is writing for an audience that can be expected to accept Pope without any special need for reclamation. But anyway it's interesting to see the range of readings of Pope's Iliad—and Levine, in fact, implies that he himself is being far more generous with Pope than some other critics have been. Another thing to talk about might be the footnotes, where Pope displays the research he's done (even if Parnell had to assist him with the Greek scholars), and openly and continually confesses his debt to Madame Dacier's text and remarks. The footnotes sometimes offer justification for translation choices (leaving out "ass," for instance), sometimes offer justification for Homer's seeming errors (low similes, or that whole essay in defense of the catalogue), sometimes simply express delight over Homer's beauties, and sometimes draw connections between particular events and the overarching themes of the work (Achilles' memories of Patroclus all being heroic memories, never soft; Achilles' character displayed consistently throughout the Iliad). To be sure, they are not Bentleian footnotes; but this is a poetic translation, not a scholarly critical edition. It seems to me that the footnotes are every bit suited to their purpose, and that Pope's level of scholarship (with whatever assistance it required) is entirely equal to his aims. Note also his occasional moralizing comments, including the rather personally motivated comments on Thersites. On the topic of the translation itself, we might mention those two bits we've quoted before: first, the somewhat problematic though elegant elaboration of "doomed to deck the bed she once enjoyed"—consider Roscommon's injunction to rather leave out than add—and second, Pope's tendency to find or impose balance and antithesis, as in "vowed with libations and with victims then, / now vanished with their smoke: the faith of men!"

Donne - Songs and Sonnets

In Donne's poems, both the Songs and Sonnets and the Holy Sonnets, I am chiefly interested in the ways that Donne represents the relationship between body, soul, and fame. In his "Epitaph on Himself," he says that as he values his fame next after his soul, he would like to give his fame the next best room ("That I might make your Cabinet my tombe, / And for my fame which I love next my soule, / Next to my soule provide the happiest roome"). There seems to be an echo here of "The Canonization," where Donne says he can "build in sonnets pretty rooms" (a play on the Italian stanza, "room"): the poem becomes an eternal abode for its subject. Donne's belief in the soul and the resurrection is clear, but he also seems to believe that some part of the "self," if only its image in the form of "fame," is also preserved in text. Two further examples from the Songs and Sonnets: "A Valediction: Of My Name, In the Window." His name, engraved in his beloved's windowpane, keeps him always with her. He describes how it both resembles him (its firmness, and its simultaneous transparency and reflectiveness to his beloved) and is able to function in his place (it may have power to "step in" and prevent her taking another lover while he is gone). He describes it as his bones and anatomy, and finally even says "thinke this name alive." There is also an echo of Horace's Ode 3.30 ("The showers and tempests can outwash" no "point, nor dash" of the name, which will be the same always). "The Extasie." The lovers' souls are suspended "betwixt" them, while the lovers themselves "like sepulchrall statues lay"; later he says that the body is to the soul as the book is to... text, presumably ("Loves mysteries in soules doe grow, / But yet the body is his booke"). Earlier in the poem there is perhaps a hinted allusion to Aristotle's De Anima regarding the composition of souls; here it seems that the relationship of form/matter is correspondent between body/soul as between book/text—with a deliberate reference to the body as a kind of funerary statue.

Pindar - Victory Odes

In a discussion of Pindar we probably want to either jump to Horace and talk about anxiety of influence, or else jump to Pope and talk about "Windsor-Forest" and Quintero's reading of it as a Pindaric panegyric. In the latter case, we might want to focus on the fact that Pindar celebrates not only his patrons, but also (perhaps even primarily) the art of poetry itself, and the power of the poet to confer fame and immortality. Pope demurs elsewhere ("I'm not used to panegyric strains"), but "Windsor-Forest" does seem to be a venture at a classical epinician, celebrating both its subject (Lord Granville) and the classical rhetorical tropes of celebration. Note: Carm. 3.30 imitates Pythian 6; poem/palace is Olympian 6; "not a sculptor" is Nemean 5

Milton - Paradise Lost

In brief, I'm interested in the ways Satan represents and prefigures 18th-century trends towards individualism, materialism, democratization, and a raising up of the particular over the universal. First, I'm interested in Satan as a sort of Faust figure who is associated with knowledge, but knowledge of the trivial, particular, transient, minute—knowledge that is purely self-absorbed and narcissistic, has no humanitarian impulse behind it, no practical benefit or moral use. I take my cue here from Thorley's paper on "Milton and the Microscope," where he notes that Satan's association (in Paradise Regained) with the microscope suggests his affiliation with minutiae, and Adam's interest in superfluous knowledge (of planets, etc.) just before his fall. An obsession with minute, impractical knowledge is the most prominently caricatured trait of "moderns" like Bentley at the turn of the next century, and the use of science for non-moral or non-practical aims is seen as typical of the Enlightenment, as of Faust. I connect this Enlightenment Satan also with David Hawkes' reading of Satan as representative of a decay towards materialism, commercialism, and consumerism. Hawkes discusses Satan's signification of money and materialism, in the sense that he signifies the mistake of regarding the sign as the referent (as money is taken for something with intrinsic value, instead of being recognized as a symbol of value). Hawkes considers Saussure and the mediation of words and signs in general, and sees Satan as focused on material or trivial particulars, missing the bigger picture (or the noumenal referents), worshiping the mediator and not the god. This reading may be applied to trends in the commodification of literature, and trends away from universals and towards particulars, hailing the individual as such and not as representative of a type or idea. (Of course Milton's actual stance here is conflicted; he has some quite individualist views.) Part of the argument for this reading might be the increasing popularity of Satan, and his association with revolutionary ideas, in the latter 18th century and the Romantic period. His individuality (opposed to God's universality) makes him appealing, and the relationship of Satan-to-God becomes associated with that of citizen-to-king in an increasingly democratized society. (Again, Milton's personal political views increase the complexity of the problem.)

Swift - The Battle of the Books

In brief, I'm still reading this text as partly or indeed largely concerned with the problem of literary immortality. The epitaphic qualities of the books in the "graveyard" of the library contribute to this argument, as does the fact that the books are engaged in a life-and-death struggle (these points have been noted by McDayter); the banishment of Fame from the library under Bentley; Swift's comments about books' "lives" and "deaths" in the Tale; and Swift's expressed feelings about the immortality of art in his "Proposal for Correcting" etc. the English language.

Sterne - A Sentimental Journey

Intended as four volumes; only two were completed before Sterne's death. They present a kind of diary or journal of the adventures (and sentiments) of the clergyman Yorick. His reasons for making the journey are unclear (they seem to be sentimental). Yorick is emotionally affected by many things he sees in his travels—a begging monk, various other beggars to whom he gives charity, a man whose beloved ass has died—and he has numerous brief romantic/sexual encounters, since he cannot seem to so much as notice a pretty woman without being overwhelmed by sentiment and gallantry. Although the praise of sentiment is clearly genuine throughout the novel—for Yorick it is the surest proof that he has a soul, and a means of communicating and sympathizing with other souls—there is a certain irony in Yorick's deliberate seeking-out of sentimental scenes in order to have his emotions stirred. He anticipates the pleasure of seeing a young woman weep as she tells him her misfortunes almost as if he were anticipating a trip to the theater to see a moving tragic play. He is irritated when a rough carriage ride distracts him from the sentimental thoughts he was preparing to have about the man whose ass had died. Dr. Hedrick clearly wants me to think about the ways in which the novel engages simultaneously with spirituality and materiality. Sentimentalism is connected with the motions and affections of the soul, yet Yorick spends a great deal of time admiring and sentimentalizing material objects: a picture-necklace given him by Eliza, a horn snuff box exchanged for his own with a beggar monk, a pair of overlarge gloves purchased from a shop-girl, Shandy's handkerchief which Maria carries. These material objects may be associated with Yorick's comment that Elysium is more vivid to him than heaven; for him, the spiritual seems inextricably bound up in the physical, and he cannot and does not try to separate them. Instead, he seeks out scenes and objects that will stir up his sentiments and thus make him sensible of his own soul. The scene that interests me the most, however, is that in which he is mistaken (by Count B***, to whom he has gone for a passport) for Shakespeare's Yorick, after he allows Shakespeare to "introduce" him. The count has asked his name; Yorick explains to the reader that he has never known how to answer the question of who he is; he can give an account of anyone else more easily than of himself. He says he wishes he could identify himself in a single word, and falls upon the expedient of opening up a volume of Shakespeare and pointing to the name Yorick, and saying, "Me, Voici!" There are many things to be said about this. One is that it corroborates Bloom's (and Milton's) view that Shakespeare has made us, that we ourselves are so well reflected in his works that to point to a passage in Shakespeare is indeed as near to explaining "who we are" as any one of us can come. But the choice of Yorick has, of course, a special meaning, since even in Shakespeare, Yorick is already dead: the power of the scene is in its sense of his absence, and a certain epitaphic presence evoked by material (the skull) and memory (Hamlet's). The epitaphic associations are made more explicit in Tristram Shandy, where "Alas, poor Yorick!" actually becomes the clergyman's epitaph (marble, incidentally). Thus what Shakespeare captures about the self is precisely its incommunicability, its always-belatedness. In order to identify himself, Yorick must point to an act of hopelessly distanced memorialization. It seems to be the sentimentality—Hamlet's emotional response to seeing the skull—that makes the mere name "Yorick" feel like a genuine act of communication: no explanation of the self can be given, but Yorick can point to human sympathy as a way in which the self may be "known" by the other.

Isocrates - Evagoras

Isocrates says, in Evagoras, that depictions of deeds are better than depictions of the body; he echoes Pindar's comment that "sculptures must necessarily remain only among those in whose cities they were set up, whereas speeches can be published throughout Greece." He adds also that a statue cannot be imitated, but good deeds and moral behavior can. All of these ideas will be echoed by Cicero, who will replace the idea of "good deeds" with the idea of the "soul" (a portrait of the soul rather than the body, as he says in the Pro Archia). It is worth considering whether, for Cicero, "soul" was just another way of saying "deeds" (i.e. the source of deeds), or whether the soul was something distinct from its outward manifestation in deeds. (Either way, the answer will give us a clearer picture of the classical notion of "self.")

Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos (May)

James May describes Cicero's oratorical and political career as essentially a chronicle of the struggle to create and maintain ethos. For an orator, ethos actually functioned as "evidence" in cases. But Cicero's status as a "new man" made ethos more difficult for him to acquire, as Cicero himself is eternally pointing out. His rhetorical efforts to develop an ethos are prominent in his speeches. I'm interested here in "ethos" as the classical equivalent of what Roach calls "it," but what I think should more accurately be equated with Roach's idea of the image or "effigy" of a celebrity figure—the popular impression or idea associated with the person, in contrast to the actual, interior person. As Roach notes, the production of fame is inextricably tied up in the production of such an image (Roach curiously does not use this word) or "body cinematic," and Cicero was clearly aware of the importance of creating a persona, an outward self, that would be performed like theater, worn like a mask. What is still more interesting is that Cicero seems to have been well aware that the ethos he projected was, explicitly, a performance, and that his interior, private self—the self he really identified as himself—was quite distinct. He also seems aware of another trend Roach points out: the importance of the paradox of "public intimacy" so important to celebrity. Cicero's particular brand of theater tends to involve at least a pretense of breaking the fourth wall, a more or less subtle acknowledgement to the audience that they are seeing a mask. Cicero's shifting ethos, in other words, anticipates the kind of publicly-intimate celebrity that Roach describes as a feature of the long/deep 18th century.

Wax Tablets of the Mind: ... Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (Small)

Jocelyn Small explores how memory techniques emerged to facilitate the shift from oral to literate society—how mnemonics were used for recalling words, quotations, drafts, speeches, etc. There are a number of interesting ideas here, including cognitive studies of, for instance, the way literacy allows greater distinction between words, grammatical forms, etc., whose shapes are largely determined, in turn, by the method of transcription. Thus literacy in its turn creates, or modifies, language. My main interest here is in the development of early mnemonic systems, specifically those that associate memory with topoi or loci, which is to say, those that use image, object, and space in ways that associate verbal with visual memory: what is heard with what is seen. I'm not yet sure how memory studies may be useful to my project in the long run, but since much of the classical poetic tradition was oral (in performance, at least), it's useful to keep in mind the ways in which oral tradition and memory systems may have affected written composition.

The English Poetic Epitaph (Scodel)

Joshua Scodel, reviewing the history of the English epitaph as a literary genre, examines the historical social functions and poetic conventions of epitaph. He examines, in particular, epitaph poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries—essentially, the period of the rise and fall of the genre. In the early 17th century, epitaph poetry becomes increasingly important, and begins to assert its preservational power as superior over the power of monument. The relationship of text vs. monument seems to mirror that of virtue vs. social status, and perhaps even soul vs. body: what is "substantial" turns out to be what is not material. In the latter 17th century, a focus on praise continues. Scodel seems to identify Pope's era, and in fact Pope's own epitaph poetry, as a kind of turning point: Pope, he says, begins to shift attention away from public praise of the dead, and toward the grief of the mourner, whose own ethos implies the worthiness of the dead. Another shift takes place toward the end of the 18th century, as proto-Romantics turn away from the poet's feelings and toward those of the reader. By this time, however, cemeteries were becoming more distant and less a part of lived experience, and epitaph poetry was becoming a mere generic convention. I'll have to come back to this after looking over Wordsworth, since I find it interesting that Scodel sees Pope as making epitaph poetry more personal—something Wordsworth clearly does not see in him. In any case, Scodel's comments on the "shift" that takes place around Pope's time seem to accord well with Hardison's on the history of the "theory of praise," where Pope appears on the cusp of new theories of poetry that are less didactic and more personal. Since I've been focusing so far on Pope and classical reception, I've been largely identifying him with the "Ancients"; but there are certainly many ways in which he breaks with tradition (and indeed he always describes himself as a moderate, neither wholly "Ancient" nor "Modern"). Part of his breaking with tradition might indeed turn out to be a move toward expressions of intimacy (here, friendship)—even if Pope's idea of "intimacy" turns out to be still too artificial to please the Romantics.

Poetry as Epitaph (Mills-Courts)

Karen Mills-Courts sets out to situate poetry between two philosophical views of language: Heidegger's, which views language as presentational (evoking presence), and Derrida's, which views language as purely representational (absence functioning as presence). The book is not, after all, especially useful or even especially interesting, I suppose mainly because its basic premise is a merely obvious one: that poetry is inherently "epitaphic" in the sense that it seeks to create presence and even a kind of embodiment (she refers in particular to Archibald MacLeash's "a poem should not mean / but be"), but is necessarily hindered by the representational limits of language. It seems to me that there is little need to bring Heidegger into the equation at all; the problem is already summed up in Derrida, for whom the emptiness of language is remarkable because language seeks to embody presence, meaning, the self. Obviously, poetry seeks to overcome the limitations of language and somehow to vitally "be." And obviously, the distance between text and self always in some measure remains. Mills-Courts' point seems to be that poetry—at least post-Romantic poetry, but some earlier poetry as well—in some sense is this impossible effort to bridge an unbridgeable gap. This seems correct, if perhaps a little obvious, from a post-Romantic standpoint. But really what's interesting about it is not the claim itself, but rather the obviousness of it: Mills-Courts seems to take it for granted that poetry has always sought to present the interior self, and that Derridean problems of language, of the spectral and specular self, have always haunted poetry. There is a certain sense in which I think this is true, but I also think it is naïve not to investigate just how true, and to acknowledge how recent an invention the modern "self" really is.

Simonides - Works/Fragments

Little is known about Simonides. His birth and death dates are widely debated. He was the uncle or great-uncle of Bacchylides, and may or may not have been a rival of Pindar. Most of our information on him comes from Hellenistic scholiasts, whose information is dubious. He is said to have invented the victory ode, the first art of memory, four letters of the Greek alphabet—among other things. He was, at least, almost certainly a writer of victory odes for pay (maybe the first to write poetry for pay), and a writer of epigrams and epitaphs. Only one epigram is believed to be reliably attributable to him, the one that appears in Herodotus, on Megistias. He was, however, widely famed in Greece, and was named one of the Nine Lyric Poets by the Hellenistic scholiasts. I'm less interested in Simonides as a real figure than in the reception of him, as a kind of legend, in Rome and possibly later on. So I guess what I'm interested in is still what I said in my M.A. report: the fact that he serves as an obvious bridge between poetry, statuary, and memory systems. The Cicero anecdote, repeated by Quintilian, is obviously the most important point of connection (since there he serves, in a way, all three functions); but there are other quotations attributed to him, like the rejection of statuary in favor of poetry, that underline his status as a poetic monument-maker.

Henry More - The Immortality of the Soul

Matter may be divided into infinitely small parts, but those infinitely small parts still have extension, although they can be divided no further (he calls them indiscerpible). The soul must be extended. He anticipates the eventual conflagration of the earth, and also the extinction of the sun, but argues that the soul will not be destroyed by these; wicked souls, however, may be burned in the conflagration, until they shall have suffered so much that they will relinquish all connection with matter and sensation, and thus become effectively dead (though still existent). Note his strange insistence that the Sun is incapable of viewing individual actions of men on earth; he offers the objection that the Sun might be capable of adjusting his instruments/organs of perception like a man squinting or dilating his pupils—that is (in More's phrase), "as through a Telescope"—but he rejects this objection as requiring that the Sun's vision be "Organical." His strangely specific, "mathematical" proofs of the inability of the sun and stars to observe mankind certainly suggest a materialistic, scientific turn in theology, and the invention of the telescope seems to be a contributing factor. Consider Milton's cosmic worldview and Satan's "aerie microscope."

Pope - Essay on Man

Maynard Mack has characterized the whole Essay as Pope's attempt at a "transliteration ... into rationalistic terms" of the Miltonic theme of Man's fall from grace. We might pursue the Faust angle here and note that the "fall" that has taken place is a fall from the cosmic to the microscopic, a trend toward the magnification of the individual, particular, minute, and a loss of the "big picture." This can in fact be compared directly with Paradise Lost if we look at Adam's misplaced interest in superfluous details about the planets as related to this general "microscopic"/Faustian trend of elevating knowledge for its own sake. Pope notes that "God loves from whole to parts," but man must "rise from individual to the whole." The problem with the new science is that it does not rise; it remains focused on the individual, and makes that its end. Characteristically, Pope does not wholly reject the new science, but advises against studying what is not useful. Aside: Mack's claim that Pope had no room in his vision of the natural world for "caverns measureless to man" strikes me as doubtful. Several passages in the Essay on Man suggest an intense fascination with cosmic vastness, if not with those feelings of terror and awe that Burke and his Romantic successors have led us to expect in association with "sublime" experiences of nature's immensity.

Artifices of Eternity (Putnam)

Michael C. J. Putnam frames his book against typical readings of Horace's later works—the Carmen Saeculare and Odes IV—as inferior works signifying a capitulation to the demands of Augustus. Putnam's book offers a linear close-reading of the entire book of Odes IV (one chapter for each of the fifteen odes) to show that Horace's celebration of the new Augustan Rome is genuine and, moreover, is a sign of his artistic power rather than of submission. Specifically, it signifies his power not only to immortalize Augustus and his historical moment (and his poet), but to create Augustus and the Augustan era through poetry: to become, in a sense, the author of the Augustan age. Putnam's readings are compelling, and so are the biographical details that he is careful not to emphasize too much. My interest in Odes IV is, of course, in its claims to its own immortalizing authority. I suppose I have nothing much to say here except that I find Putnam's readings attractive and persuasive, though that may matter little if my work is in eighteenth-century reception, since Horace during that period was generally charged with a certain unfortunate sycophancy.

Hooke - Micrographia

Micrographia was one of the Royal Society's earliest publications. Pepys (a future president of the Royal Society) loved it, and bought it almost straight off the press (he already had a microscope). Robert Hooke wrote in 1665: "By the means of Telescope, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding." If we want to focus on a particular insect, we can note the louse, and the comical description of it as a kind of upstart lordling, rising above its proper station. (Note also, regarding the Royal Society, Hooke's esperiment of cutting open a live dog, using a bellows to inflate the lungs and keeping the heart beating for more than an hour.) Topics of discussion here will be either Paradise Lost or Gulliver's Travels. In short, Micrographia rather graphically illustrates the problems that many people saw in the new science of the 17th century: it exaggerated the importance of minute, trivial matters, and glorified the pursuit of knowledge as such, rather than encouraging knowledge as a means to wisdom, moral behavior, etc.

Homer - Iliad

Nagy mentions Achilles singing the κλέα ἀνδρῶν, and takes this as evidence that the pursuit of fame-through-song predates the Iliad. Also, of course, there is the prophecy that makes Achilles choose between a long but unremarkable life and a glorious but brief one that will be remembered—and Hector's parallel desire, in his last moments, not to survive but to be remembered after death. These are all in some sense merely manifestations of the Greek love of "glory," but as Nagy points out, kleos is explicitly the glory of being remembered in song. This is separate from e.g. kudos, geras, and timé, which can be acquired during life; kleos is generally reserved for the dead, and etymologically suggests a kind of literary afterlife. Obviously there are connections with Pindar here, especially as the agon of the crown games was regarded as sufficiently glorious to confer kleos on the living. What Pindar does is essentially to sing the κλέα ἀνδρῶν. It has even been claimed, somewhat oddly, that Statius (in the Thebaid, I think) makes Achilles out as a kind of proto-Pindar.

"Victory Statue, Victory Song: Pindar's agonistic poetics and its legacy" (O'Sullivan)

O'Sullivan reviews the history of the practice of honoring athletes with statues and victory songs, especially during the period of Pindar and Bacchylides' compositions. Responding to Debra Steiner's Images in Mind, O'Sullivan notes that statuary and epinician were in a kind of agonistic contest of their own. He offers a number of examples to show that makers of statues and makers of victory odes saw themselves in competition with one another, including a great many examples from Pindar's odes. He notes that Pindar's position is surprising in a culture that so often treated images as efficacious and animate. One question worth considering is to what extent a depiction within a text or oral composition could also be considered "efficacious and animate." That is, in a society that saw representations as potentially vitalized, what is the status of a text? Epitaph and the idea of the "speaking stone" may offer some clue, but we must also consider Plato's comment that a text (which he also compares to an image) is not capable of dialogue. Thus Plato seems to reject the efficacy and animacy of all representations (which is characteristic of Plato, after all; he demands access to the ideal forms themselves). But was there a sense in which, for less philosophical-minded Greeks, singing the klea andron might in some sense bring the dead heroes back to life?

Milton - On Shakespeare

Obviously there's plenty to say on this one, but I guess I'll address Dr. Rumrich's comments on it rather than the text itself. Dr. Rumrich has noted the dual tense in "star-ypointing," where the prefixed "y" indicates past tense, but the participial ending is present. He focuses on the image of a pyramid as especially appropriate because of the suggestion of a monument in which almost the whole of the deceased person is still preserved, and he notes that the parchments in which mummies were wrapped were, in Milton's day, used medicinally and believed to have life-preserving powers. He also comments on the "Delphic lines" and the power of the Delphic oracle to channel gods or spirits, which would speak through her. He does not comment on the Horatian intertext, or the puns on stone ("our wonder and astonishment"). He says something about the "deep impression" of the lines, but I can't recall whether he explicitly equates them with the incised text of an epitaph. Mainly what he's interested in is the question of to what extent Milton views text as preserving, almost literally, the "precious life-blood" of an author: an essence that is akin to the sublimated, "intellectual spirit" that makes man more like angels and less like animals. For Milton, reason is the soul; therefore to kill a good book is, he says in Areopagitica, as bad as to kill a man, since a good book is reason itself. Shakespeare has managed to put so much of himself into his text that he is in some sense more alive than those who read him; they become stone, but he is perpetually revitalized through them. I'm actually not sure what to say about this apart from all the obvious things about Milton's own desire to be preserved, and his apparent belief that to be preserved textually was indeed possibly (perhaps more literally possible than one generally imagines, if Dr. Rumrich is correct). But I'll note that we can hardly avoid bringing up Bloom here, since his whole Introduction to the second edition of Anxiety of Influence is a kind of reiteration of this theme (though he never mentions the poem): he claims that Shakespeare cannot be described in terms of how his culture constructed him or even how ours constructs him, because he has constructed us; we are too much a product of his imagination to get far enough outside of him to view him "in context." I don't know whether I agree with this, but it seems evident that Milton does. For him, Shakespeare's essence has been imparted to all his readers and all those under his influence; they are in some sense his creations, in much the way that Frankenstein (both the text itself and the not-actually-eponymous monster—as Dr. Rumrich has pointed out) is in part a "creation" of Paradise Lost.

Cicero - De Oficiis

On Duties. This text is mainly interesting for the way it describes the pursuit of fame as actually a kind of civic duty. For Cicero, the pursuit of glory is evidence of morality and a sense of social responsibility: fame is associated with noble deeds, and is not seen as self-serving, but as the reward for those who are self-denying and who are devoted to serving the republic. By contrast, he views indifference to fame as a sign of arrogance and selfishness. The man who does not care what the world thinks of him will not make sacrifices for the benefit of others. This is probably a somewhat dubious view even in Cicero's day. It seems that Cicero is not so much describing how fame actually works, as proposing an ideal system; he is always keen to associate fame with merit, as opposed to wealth or high birth. The idea of merit as "greatness" would become central to humanism, where individual virtue is celebrated over social rank, wealth, etc. It's a view associated with both Stoicism and Christianity. What makes Cicero unusual is his special focus on the connection between virtue and fame. Humanism would have to grapple with the conflict between Christian modesty-as-virtue and classical glory-as-virtue, with Cicero as a possible model for reconciling the pursuit of fame with the virtue of selflessness.

Addison/Steele - Spectator

On fame, note Spectator 166. This issue begins by noting that literature, especially thanks to print, is capable of a longevity approaching perhaps to worldly immortality, unlike other arts such as statuary and painting, which must decay with time. The piece is mainly concerned, however, with castigating anyone who should abuse this potential immortality of text to offer anything corrupting to posterity. It concludes with a note about the Roman Catholic belief that an author of evil texts will be held in purgatory until his work ceases to operate sinfully in the world; there is then an anecdote about an atheist who, on his deathbed, seems to repent of his evil works, but then becomes offended when the priest tells him that no one is reading his works anyway. The alleged Roman Catholic belief is certainly the most interesting point here, whether true or false. Like Milton's life-blood preserved, this belief suggests the idea that a text is a kind of proxy self—and in this case, it is not only that the proxy self can affect others; the sins of the proxy also rebound on the self. There are also three essays on fame in late December of 1711, showing why God may have instilled the desire of it in man, but also showing that the desire of fame is harmful, and that fame is difficult to obtain and of little benefit or pleasure even if it is obtained.

Cicero - De Legibus

On the Laws. A fragmentary text: midway through Book 3 it breaks off. Cicero models his discussion of law on Plato's The Laws, using the dialogue form, and framing it as a discussion between himself, his brother Quintus, and his friend Atticus. He views natural/universal law as proceeding from a higher power, and right judgment of good and evil available through the application of human reason. He proposes reforms that he thinks would align human law more closely with natural law. My interest here is chiefly in the opening scene where the party comes upon an old oak, reminding Atticus of the oak associated by legend with Gaius Marius, a general and consul. Whether such an oak exists or not, Quintus says it "will always stand, for it was planted by literary ability," and "memory keeps alive many things for longer than they could have survived naturally." The scene itself recalls Plato's Phaedrus, where Phaedrus asks if a certain plane tree is really the place where Boreas abducted Orithyia. The interesting point here is that without referencing monument, Cicero again emphasizes the durability of text over material objects: a textual tree can outlive any physical tree. By implication, transformation into legend/myth/text is the way to longevity/immortality. A side note: the text draws a distinction between factual/historical truth and poetic truth; it is improper to treat poetry as if it were meant to record historical facts, rather than presenting truth through memorable symbols. Anna Dolganov has noted that poetry is here presented has having the strange power to "memorialize" what never actually existed.

Augustine - Confessions

On the self: Augustine does not reckon what he does not remember among his sins. The self seems to be determined by memory. Yet he recognizes that there are parts of the self that cannot be accessed by memory or self-reflection: "I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is the mind, then, too restricted to compass itself ... ?" This seems to be a more serious problem than Descartes', and one not addressed, as far as I can recall, in Plato. For Aristotle, whatever is separable from the soul is not the soul; memories are merely properties of the thing, and not the thing itself. Plato partly explains or demonstrates the immortality of the soul by reference to memory. But for Augustine the problem is that there is much that is not remembered, and the question of whether what is not remembered still constitutes the self. To broaden the topic, Augustine in general is concerned with the fact that he cannot always correctly analyze the motives or actions of his own soul. He cannot always tell whether he is doing the good for the right reason. He cannot tell whether he is eating out of necessity or for pleasure. He worries that pity itself may become a kind of addiction, making a man enjoy seeing pain in order to experience the greatness of soul that comes with pitying those who suffer. He is worried about whether he performs virtuous acts for their own sake, or in order to be praised for them. For Augustine the soul is complex and largely hidden from its own view. Plato is almost wholly concerned with the soul's relation to externals—mainly eternal truths and ideal forms, like beauty, justice, love. Augustine is concerned with the soul's relation to itself; he certainly appears to be the author, in literal terms, of introspection.

Hugo - Notre-Dame de Paris

One of the main points of the novel is to dramatize the historical moment, just post-Gutenberg, when (according to Hugo) architecture is about to be superceded by literature, thanks to print technology. This is, as Hugo describes it, "the greatest event in history"; "the mother of revolutions." But he is also clearly comparing it to the French Revolution, and pointing out that it accomplished a movement in the same direction: away from theocracy, caste, tradition, universals, static symbols, dead languages, and toward democracy, variety, progress, individualism, motion, vulgar tongues. In short, both revolutions stand as evidence of Hugo's claim that all civilizations begin as theocracies and end as democracies. Notre-Dame itself is a hybrid building, part Romanesque and part Gothic, which in Hugo's reading makes it partly archaic/theocratic and partly modern/democratic. Hugo wants his novel, too, to be monumental, and also liminal. In his essay on Sir Walter Scott, he had described the need for a literature that could be both real and ideal; the introduction to Notre-Dame de Paris sets it out as just such a novel, capable of two kinds of readings, literal and hieroglyphic (two different readings offered, in-text, by Quasimodo and Claude Frollo, respectively). Thus it is possible for a novel to have the immediacy of the real world, but also the immortality of stone. Which brings us to the last topic, immortality (and monument). Hugo points out that one of the reasons for inscribing thoughts in stone was to make them imperishable. But with the advent of printing, text has become more imperishable than ever, and so now thought itself "has passed from being durable to being immortal." An interesting feature to note here is that throughout the novel, flesh and stone people are frequently interchangeable: men are described as stone or marble; statues are described as if animate. The idea of a liminal text, one that can capture immediacy and vitality and yet also endure, is all through the book. Note, however, that Hugo seems probably mistaken to argue that immortality was sought chiefly in architecture rather than text up until the advent of printing. Many of our other sources, including ancient ones like Pindar, Plato, Cicero, Horace, and Virgil, stand as evidence to the contrary. Though perhaps Hugo would have argued, as he does regarding Dante and Shakespeare, that such men were rare exceptions.

Virgil - Eclogues

Originally called "pastorals" (bucolica), later designated as "selections" (eclogae) because they do not fit the type of the pastoral as conceived by Theocritus (who invented the genre, and whom Virgil was imitating). Much has been made of the formal qualities of the text; for example, the poems alternate so that every other one is a dialogue (the rest are narratives or monologues), and the ten poems can be considered either as a sequence (moving toward meta-poetics in the latter poems) or as a balanced set (with the fifth eclogue as the central poem, and similar poems falling in the same place on either side of it, e.g. 4 and 6 are similar, 3 and 7, etc.). Paul Alpers notes that most of the poems contain some kind of tension between perspectives, and takes Segal's view that these perspectives should be viewed as in "suspension" (rather than as being resolved on one side or the other). He places the poems within not only the historical crisis surrounding the death of Caesar, but also the cultural crisis of Alexandrianism, "the reduction of ancient myth and heroic narration to sophisticated bookishness." Although we don't see here in Virgil the same "anxiety of influence" that we see in Horace, the "cultural crisis" of Alexandrianism, which forms a context for both of them, is worth remarking. Part of what must be done in the Augustan age is to create a national literature that can vie with prior Greek literature, that acknowledges its debt to Greek literature, but that addresses Roman concerns; and one of the problems that Virgil and Horace both face is that myths, for them, have become merely metaphors or fictions, and cannot be deployed with the same force of faith that was available to the Greeks. This problem is similar to that of the neoclassical period, in which the whole classical world becomes a world of primitive but robust myths and powers of belief, whereas the modern world is characterized by skepticism, science, and Bentleian scholarship (not unlike Alexandrian, in its way). Pope's decision to model his satires after Horace's, after imitating Virgil in his "Pastorals," may reflect an identification not just with their personal viewpoints but with the particular problems of authorship during their period.

"The Absent Dead: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Epitaph" (Fry)

Paul Fry regards epitaph as antithetical to the sublime, since it essentially involves the concession that no true connection exists between signifier and signified, and that the self cannot be communicated. I'm not sure this paper is actually particularly useful, but it does offer some interesting comments on the degrees of absence in epitaph (the "self" is absent), cenotaph (even the body is absent), literary epitaph (even the tomb is absent), and literary cenotaph (so many layers of absence that this often becomes the ironic subject of the text). In some sense, epitaphic poetry is always about the impossibility of communication. This reading might be interesting to apply to ancient Greek and Roman epitaph, at least some of which also seems to be aware of its insufficiency.

Jonson - Masque of Queens

Performed in 1609. Begins with an anti-masque of witches representing opposites of Fame, such as Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc. The witches are interrupted by Perseus, who announces Fame; Fame herself then appears, and the House of Fame for a backdrop. The design in modeled on Chaucer, with the great poets (Homer, Virgil, Lucan) as columns supporting the heroes they sang (Achilles, Aeneas, Caesar), and with depictions of battles, sacrifices, etc. between the pillars. Fame identifies Virtue as her father. The masquers sing that Fame's house is "all of echo made," and say that to neglect Fame is to scorn Virtue. The final song implies that the fames of the ancients were inferior, as they were built on glory; but true ("good") fame inheres in virtue, and will never decay. There is a strange conflict here between the implication that Greek and Roman (and Persian, etc.) fame is transitory because glorious rather than virtuous—with Homer, Virgil, etc. supporting the main pillars of the House of Fame. Jonson himself, remarking in a footnote that the ladies chosen for the masque were selected by chance, not merit, seems to confess the irony of the whole production. I think the best route here would be to talk about Hardison's "theory of praise," and how Jonson is clearly having some trouble reconciling a Christian notion of "virtue" with the didactic value of the great classical epics, which, however, he clearly does value.

Petrarch - Letters to Ancients

Petrarch began by writing a letter to Cicero after finding his letters to Atticus. Later he wrote a second letter to Cicero, and then he wrote a collection of "Letters to Ancients." Those addressed are: Homer (the only Greek), Virgil, Horace, Cicero (twice), Quintilian, Seneca, Varro, Livy, Pollio. Petrarch wrote an explanation when he published the letters, expecting his readers to be rather astonished by them. The first letter to Cicero is mildly reproachful. The second is apologetic and rather more intimate, indulging more fully in the fiction of Cicero's being able to read it. In addressing Quintilian, he describes having received his works in a badly mutilated state, and says this fills him with grief like seeing the mangled limbs of a beautiful body. He reports to Virgil on the current state of Italy (after having declined to tell Cicero about it, saying that it would be painful for him to hear). Homer he hesitates to write to, because he can neither read nor write well in Greek, and this, he says, prevented him from the hope of "seeing" Homer "near at hand." He says that in Homer's case he is replying to a "letter received." He writes in prose, as he is reading a prose Latin translation of the Iliad, and feels that the style allows him to come a little closer to the proper idiom. He says he is like a child, babbling and thinking he is therefore "conversing," with those of superior intellect. He apologizes for being so little able to help Homer, swearing on "a God unknown to you" that he can offer nothing but pity and loyal service. Finally he says, as if recalling himself: "I have spoken at great length as if you were present. Emerging now from those very vivid flights of imagination, I realize how very far removed you are"—and he fears Homer will find it annoying to have to read such a long letter, in the dark of the netherworld.

Plato - Phaedrus

Phaedrus is one of Plato's dialogues on rhetoric. Plato and Phaedrus consider three speeches on the same subject (love), discuss the ethics of rhetoric, and ask whether rhetoric is really a techne (art) and what features it would need in order to be one. There are three points here that I'd be interested to discuss. First, there is the opening scene when Phaedrus notes that a certain plane tree might be near where "they say" Boreas carried Orithuia away. He is surprised that Socrates speaks of the myth as if it were true. Socrates says that one could tell a clever story to explain what "really" happened, but to explain away all myths in such a way would take a great deal of ingenuity and time, and he has "no time for such things." Might as well just accept myths as if they were true. Later on, Phaedrus will laugh at him for making up a story, and Socrates, irritated, will point out that the question is not whether the story is literally true, but whether it conveys truth. Cicero evidently connected these parts of the Phaedrus, since they are united into a single scene in his De Legibus, with the message that myths and poetry should not be interrogated for historical truth; their truths are paradigmatic, metaphorical. My interest here is in Socrates' (and Cicero's) irritation at the person who tries to investigate, literalize, historicize, and ingeniously "explain" the myths—this figure certainly appears like a critic of the Bentley variety, one who fails to see the larger picture, and becomes entangled in minor details. Second, there is the story (the one Phaedrus laughs at, actually) of Theuth and Thamus. Theuth has invented writing, among other things, but King Thamus of Egypt is unimpressed with the invention. Theuth says it is a kind of magic elixir of memory to make men wise, but Thamus says it is only a device for reminding, and only makes men seem wise, while they in fact know nothing. Third, there is the discussion of the problem of texts as modes of communication: they cannot engage in dialectic, but can only say the same thing forever, regardless of whom they address, or whether they are understood. I connect both of these (the problem of text and the problem of writing) with the related problem of epitaph or monument. The point is that text seems to promise a kind of direct, unmediated communication from the author to the reader (Cicero sometimes describes it this way when writing to Atticus), but ultimately (as Derrida also notes), text is absence; writing can remind, can signify, but cannot convey its truth to anyone not already familiar with what the reminder is intended to recall. Kripke's philosophy is a possible way to get around this (and so is Hilary Putnam's, to some extent), but Plato still has a point.

Cicero - Epistulae ad Atticum

Possibly not published until sometime in the first century—there are no references to them before that (as there are to some of his other letters). The letters to Atticus span a period of twenty-four years, from 68 BC (when he was 38, and held the rank of aedile, the second level of magistracy in the cursus honorum) to 44 BC (the year before his death). The letters thus span Cicero's whole later political career, as aedile, praetor, and then consul; the episode in which Catiline attempted to have him assassinated in a coup; the return of Caesar, the war with Pompey (and his traveling with Pompey's army), Caesar's murder, the triumvirate of Octavian; and so forth, through his Phillipics, and also the death of his daughter Tullia. The letters were rediscovered by Petrarch in 1345, who at first objected to how weak and flawed a figure Cicero presented in them. In some places they are full of self-praise and expectations of lasting fame; in other places, they are a bit melodramatically tragic (during his exile, for instance), with frequent exclamations of despair, lamentations of having lost everything and having no possible future, mentions of thoughts of suicide—but in other places the pathos seems more genuinely suited to the occasion, and the comments and self-reproaches seem sincere. He mentions being disgusted with himself, hating that he has shown less courage than he wishes, and being conflicted about choosing sides between Caesar and Pompey, and afraid of being thought a coward if he retracts his original position. The letters are remarkable for their openness and for presenting a different, more intimate and self-doubting Cicero than his published works display. It might well be worth talking about Petrarch's having incurred a rather serious injury from his transcription of these letters, which he seems to have placed precariously in his study, so that it was continually falling and hitting his leg, eventually causing a wound that led him to fear for his life. When he talks about this incident, he refers to the text as "Cicero," and attributes Cicero's personality to it, joking that Cicero could not abide being so near to the floor (and was rebuking Petrarch for giving him such a low station), or that Cicero struck him in order to be sure of leaving a lasting physical impression so that he might never be forgotten.

Pope - Pastorals

Probably I'll start by referencing David Durant, who argues that the Pastorals "move from an assumption that art exists to reflect nature to an assertion that nature exists to serve art." Durant makes several interesting points, but is, I think, ultimately misreading the evidence. His close readings show that from Spring to Winter, Pope represents a movement toward the increasing objectification and subjugation of the natural world (natural objects become personifications in summer, metaphors in fall, and in winter there is a full reversal: it is the environment that resembles the human world. Compare with Gay's Trivia (and certain passages of Swift) where e.g. you can tell it's summer because the women are wearing summer dresses—human "signs" (literal signposts) replace natural signs (this is discussed more fully by Henry Power in Epic into Novel) Durant fails, however, to note that the general trend of the pastorals is one of decay (toward winter, nightfall, death, sorrow). If art has triumphed over nature, as Durant says, the triumph has been a dismal one. This looks more like the fearful conquest of the natural by the artificial—almost a foretaste of the Dunciad; it represents a fall away from a Hesiodic, classical golden age. Possibly note Mack's comment (in The Garden and the City) that Pope's literary career began, as it were, in a garden (the pastorals) and ended in a city (the Dunciad). It is interesting if the Pastorals actually foreshadow the sequence. As further evidence, there are also explicit Milton echoes, suggesting that the pastorals are representing the "fall" in much the way Mack claims the Essay on Man is doing. There is a reflection-gazing scene after which the looker shuns his image. Also: "This harmless grove no lurking viper hides, / But in my breast the serpent Love abides" (67-8). Interestingly, the "serpent" here is not external to Man, but internal; Nature is "harmless," and evil appears rather in human nature.

Homer - Odyssey

Probably what we want to talk about here is how Achilles, when called up from the dead, now says he would prefer to have chosen a long life and to have forfeited glory. Nagy makes the comparison between the Iliad and the Odyssey a comparison of kleos versus nostos—the desire for fame versus the desire for a homecoming. But of course Odysseus actually achieves kleos by means of his successful nostos, and through wiliness rather than courage, too. He is a trickster hero who succeeds by devious means. Another point of comparison, besides the Iliad, is Plato's Phaedo, where death is depicted as a great good. Instead of descending as a shade to Hades, Socrates describes the soul (of the virtuous man) ascending into the ether, to perceive truths directly. It's unclear whether Achilles would have ascended to such an afterlife (on any of Socrates' various afterlife models), but if, as Socrates says in the Symposium, the objective of love is an impulse toward immortality, then Achilles surely has little right to complain.

Cicero - Epistulae ad Familiares

Rediscovered by Coluccio Salutati in 1392 (not quite fifty years after Petrarch found the Letters to Atticus). The best way to talk about these will probably be to discuss Cicero's importance in the medieval curriculum: discuss his influence on the ars dictaminis, then the influence of his letters, especially in the 15th century with the advent of print, on epistolography and on Latin education generally. The ad familiares are useful because they illustrate a variety of styles, as Cicero addresses persons of various ranks, on various subjects. These letters could be used to teach Latin grammar, rhetorical style, epistolographic conventions, social etiquette, historical information, and so on, to students at all levels of the Latin curriculum.

Donne - Holy Sonnets

See above regarding Donne generally. The poems that interest me in particular are these: Holy Sonnets 6 and 7 describe death (which will "instantly unjoynt / My body , and soule") and then resurrection ("arise, arise / From death, you numberlesse infinities / Of soules, and to your scattered bodies goe"). The body and soul, though parted at death, will be reunited at the resurrection. The soul thus, although distinct from the body, seems to be necessarily embodied (as in Aristotle). The poem "To Mr. Tilman After He Had Taken Orders" also uses an example of the relationship of body to soul that recalls Aristotle, who says that the soul is the form of the body as the shape of a wax seal is the form of the wax. Donne says "Thou art the same materials, as before, / Onely the stampe is changed." The soul, he implies, is altered when one takes holy orders, made more receptive to divine influence (like a magnet). But if the soul is the form of the body, then embodiment is still necessary to it. Also: Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keepes souls, The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enroules. Donne, final lines of the First Anniversarie

Sidney - Apology for Poetry

Sidney defends poetry chiefly by claiming that it is didactic and moral: it teaches men to understand universals and broad philosophical ideas by offering concrete, particular examples; and it urges and inspires them to imitation of virtue and rejection of vice. It is superior to philosophy because philosophy is vague, therefore unmemorable, and because it only explains, without inspiring. He answers Plato's three objections to poetry: that it is trivial, that it lies, and that it rouses passions. He concludes his long apology by cursing whoever hates poetry with a fate of being forgotten: that "when you die, your memory die from the want of an epitaph." Sidney's Apology is obviously a strong supporting proof for Hardison's "theory of praise," and the mingling of Platonic and Aristotelian theories of poetry. What might be most interesting here, though, is Sidney's repeated praise for the particular, and the capacity of a particular to encapsulate universal ideas. Sidney, unlike Cicero, does not harp on the power of poetry to preserve an individual, though he mentions it in his forceful closing line. Overall, he is focused on the power of poetry to use an individual, real or fictional, to present, teach, illustrate, and inspire devotion to an idea. It is, in short, a necessary mediation, a "popular philosophy" for men who cannot receive philosophy in its more unmediated, opaque forms. Sidney does not say so, but the idea seems to be that poetry provides mediating symbols much as religion does, and allows men to contemplate divine or abstract principles through concrete, material signs. Obviously this is the function of words in general; but Sidney's presentation of it does, I think, particularly call religious practice to mind.

Plato - Phaedo

Socrates says philosophers are always pursuing death, since death is the separation of the soul from the body, and philosophy always pursues such a separation, because the body hinders thought and hinders the perception of true things. Socrates' interlocutors ask him how he can be sure that the soul survives after death. He makes them several answers: if opposites generate opposites, then life generates death; the doctrine of recollection shows that the soul existed before birth; the soul is an essence like beauty, and thus cannot decay like mortal things. Also, the soul, which partakes essentially of life, repels its opposite, death. The soul is therefore immortal and imperishable. He describes the fate of the soul after death; souls that were too bound to the body in life are too heavy to ascend, and may become ghosts, haunting tombs; others ascend to the ether, where they see truth. The most interesting thing for my topic here is probably what happens at the end, when Crito asks, "In what way shall we bury you?" Socrates jokes about Crito's mistake of thinking that his self is the body that will remain after he is dead, and not the soul that they've been discussing all day, which will depart. He says Crito is welcome to bury him any way he pleases—if he can catch him. Then to the group he adds: "I cannot make Crito believe that I am the same Socrates who have been talking and conducting the argument; he fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead body." The important point here is the way Socrates keeps referring to his soul as "I," distinguishing the I that is speaking from the "Socrates" that is mere body. There are two Socrateses, one spirit and one flesh. But the spirit is the I. More ancient Greek religion did not seem to have such a definite view of the soul as the personal self; the "shade" that went to Hades was a mere image, and it was generally unclear whether it retained any memories or powers of further action. Achilles, in the Odyssey, would rather have chosen long life and not the immortality of fame, now that he finds what death is like. But according to Socrates, death is actually preferable to life: it is only in death that the soul at last becomes fully and freely itself. This is certainly a serious step toward a conception of the intimate, interior self—a soul whose portrait is, as Cicero says, more valuable than that of the body.

Boswell - London Journal

Some general points to note: Boswell's smug manner, his play-acting (he decides to become a number of different characters depending on what suits him at the time), his inability to take life seriously (and his understanding that in order to be at all successful or even happy, one must nevertheless at least try or pretend to take life seriously), his vacillation between being dignified and being amusing (to be amusing pleases people in the short term, but makes them despise one behind one's back), his tendencies to "melancholy" (just touched on here; he mentions it to Johnson). Two further points of interest: First, Boswell's terror of ghosts, his superstitious habits, his having been afraid to sleep alone until he was eighteen, and his continuing habit of running off to share Erskine's bed whenever he becomes afraid of the dark. Second, the record of Johnson's suggestion that Boswell keep a journal, and his insistence that "there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man." I think the main point here may have to be Johnson's comment that the journal cannot possibly contain anything too trivial, and Boswell's utter delight at being justified in his vanity by Johnson. Clearly nothing could please him more than to have an opportunity to display himself as completely, yet as pleasingly, as possible. People are continually telling him how charming he is, even though everyone seems to be aware that he is extremely vain. He seems sure that the paradox will hold in print, too: his very candor will turn out to be entirely winning, and his sins or faults, such as they are, will appear so innocent in his recital of them as to be easily forgiven. He seems to regard himself as a character in a novel. In some ways he seems to anticipate Rousseau; he certainly seems to take candor in self-representation as a high virtue.

Shelley - A Defense of Poetry

Some major points: The highest poetry is universal, and differs from prose only in its universality. Poetry deals with similarities and synthesis, whereas reason deals with difference and analysis. A poet cannot achieve his full fame within his lifetime, since the judgment which sits on a poet belongs to all time, and requires many generations of evaluation. Poetry is not good because it is morally didactic; rather, it lifts the veil of hidden beauty, defamiliarizes things, and in this way strengthens man's moral faculty. We might want to focus on the shift in perspective on how poetry should operate on morality: instead of requiring the poetry represent moral action or praise it, Shelley suggests that poetry, by virtue of revealing or creating beauty, develops man's moral faculties. Poetry is thus inherently humanizing, not because of any particular moral message but because of its general effects on the operation of the mind. It causes reflection and self-reflection. Hence more rhetorically didactic poets, like Pope and Swift, get almost swept out of the canon by Romanticism; for Shelley they probably belong more to the number of "mere reasoners," like Locke, than to poetry proper—whereas Herodotus and Livy are allowed, by Shelley, to be poets.

Bacon - Essays

Some points to note: Of Fame—unfinished. But he mentions as a positive point on Death, that it "openeth the gate to good fame." On children: the best and greatest deeds are often performed by childless men, though being childless also makes men bold, not only in great deeds but also in mischievous ones. Of Superstition—Plutarch says he would rather men said there had been no Plutarch than that men said he had eaten his children like Saturn; false beliefs are worse even than atheism. Of Deformity—deformed persons are deformed in mind as well, not of necessity, but because of the treatment they receive, though it is possible in rare cases for them to be virtuous and excellent (Socrates may be an example). And on Masques (and Triumphs), they are diverting but inane; at any rate they should be manly and tragical, and should not include dancing, angels, or devils. The first few points are the ones most worth mentioning: he says Fame is made a "monster" by the poets, who supply her with all manner of contradictory features, apparently because it is so difficult to differentiate between true and false fame, good and bad fame, and so forth. Bacon considers Fame to be a topic of great importance that has never yet been handled as it ought to be, and he proposes to make a full inquiry into it—he almost sounds like he wants to write on it like Aristotle, investigating whatever pertains to a full understanding of it. It is interesting, then, that he fails to do so, leaving the piece unfinished after only about a page or so.

Images in Mind (Steiner)

Steiner discusses the social, political, and religious roles that statuary and monument played in Archaic and Classical Greece, based on the records in extant texts. She considers funerary and memorial statues as well as other kinds, such as statues set up as offerings or in gratitude to the gods. I'm mainly interested in two points: 1) In some cases, a statue was buried in place of the dead. The psyche of the dead cannot rest in Hades until a proper burial has been conducted (as we see with Patroclus in the Iliad), and so if the body cannot be found, a statue may serve as a substitute. This seems to indicate the capacity of the statue to stand in for the dead. 2) Statues were often believed to be in some sense animate—capable, for instance, of causing famine or other plagues if not properly honored. In one case, a statue that fell on a man was convicted of homicide and punished by being thrown into the sea. This suggests that statues were perceived as invested with some kind of spirit. My own observation is that if statues are inspirited and stand in for the dead, they nevertheless do not seem to be inspirited by the dead. The common practice of epitaph and statue inscriptions is to read "I am" (or "this is") "the sign of x" Thus even in cases where the statue "speaks" for itself ("I am"), it is not identified with the person it represents, but only as a sign (sema) of that person. The same perhaps applies to victory songs, which also preserve an animated "sign" of the laudandus (more animated than statuary, according to Pindar).

Pope - Essay on Criticism

The Essay on Criticism takes the stance that knowledge does not become virtue until it is joined to some practical and moral use. The poem asserts its authority by performing an ethos of both aesthetic and moral excellence. It is arguably a response, in part, to the Battle of the Books; there are echoes of Swift in it, and the attack on petty, quibbling critics puts one definitely in mind of Bentley. Pope insists on a middle way: he does not reject criticism or knowledge but wants to temper and direct them with aesthetic and moral ends. Antithesis in the poem largely serves to balance and reconcile opposites, not to separate them; the good critic is explicitly described as a sort of walking paradox, a union of seemingly contrary traits. Pope, across his career, has set himself up as the arbiter of criticism—not of art but of the evaluation of art. The Essay on Criticism, like the Dunciad, puts him in a role as a critic of critics.

Aristotle - Poetics

The Poetics, like most of Aristotle's works, is quite dense. Mainly it's concerned with describing the features (and best practices in composition) of tragedy. Some of the most important and influential claims that Aristotle makes are that poetry is imitation (of an action, not of characters); that serious genres depict better men, comic genres worse; that plot is the chief end of tragedy, with characters merely subordinate; unity of plot (no mention of the other two unities, though time must be limited to what is easily encompassed by memory); that tragedy should arouse pity and fear in order to achieve catharsis; that nothing improbable should occur, and all actions should develop naturally from the characters and circumstances. Also, poetry is graver and more philosophic than history, because it deals in universals. We can talk about Hardison here, of course, or about Sidney's Apology, which relies pretty heavily on Aristotle in order to argue against Plato, using the claim that poetry is more universal and more grave and philosophical than history in order to defend poetry as, indeed, a better (because more widely accessible) form of philosophy. As an aside, it's remarkable how accurately Aristotle's Poetics still describes both fiction and drama.

Plato - Symposium

The Symposium describes a drinking party at which all of the participants are asked to give an encomium of Love. Socrates recalls how he himself was taught about Love by his instructress Diotima. Love is the pursuit of the good, and is an act of procreation carried out in pursuit of immortality—either literal procreation, or procreation through the "children" of their virtues. Solon's laws are his "children"; Homer's epics are his. "Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones?" Ultimately, all loves of transient things tend toward the love of the immortal virtues, which will make one "the friend of God" and allow one to become immortal oneself, "if mortal man may." Diotima says, "I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue, for they desire the immortal." I suppose the main point to discuss here would be that Plato's dialogues are clearly his children, fathered, after a manner, on Socrates himself. They are the material proofs of his virtue, comparable to Homer's epics or Solon's laws. Cicero will likely take his cue from this dialogue; Cicero is always saying that the most virtuous men are precisely those who are most interested in immortality, and he is also insistent upon connecting immortality to virtue and merit. As an aside, it's interesting that Alcibiades describes Socrates as "always repeating the same things in the same words"; if this is true, Socrates seems to be something like the texts he accuses, in the Phaedrus, of saying the same things always, to everyone. But according to Alcibiades, when you open up those words, like a bust of Silenus, one finds undreamed-of beauties and virtues inside. Whether the same can be said of his words once they have become text, is unclear.

Horace - Odes

The best angle for Horace might be to talk about the influence of Pindar, Sappho, and Alcaeus on his work, Horace's feelings of belatedness, and Horace's use of intertext to achieve and appropriate authority; read these against Bloom's arguably mistaken belief that the "anxiety of influence" does not appear until after the time of Shakespeare. Horace's poems are not only "strong misreadings" of Pindar, Sappho, and Alcaeus, they are deliberate "swerves" from their predecessors, often including an incipit that is a direct translation of the incipit of some original from which Horace's versions end up diverging widely. Horace offers frequent recusatios to explain his not writing Pindaric epinician, yet is, in Bloom's phrase (which he takes from Kierkegaard), clearly "striving" with Pindar. The idea that literary fame is both dependent upon and threatened by great literary predecessors is at least as old as Horace.

Cicero - Tusculanae Disputationes

The first book is "On the Contempt of Death." The book was written after Cicero's daughter's death, and so the topic is of personal importance to him. He endeavors to prove that death is not an evil. The argument is presented in dialogue form, though with most of the dialogue on one side. The interlocutor notes that he has read arguments about the immortality of the soul, including Plato's Timaeus, and always agrees with them while reading, but ceases to believe them once he sets the text aside. One may well imagine this to have been Cicero's own experience; we know that after Tullia's death, he visited Atticus and read all the books of the Greeks on overcoming grief, and complained that they had no effect. Evidently he decided to compose his own. His argument in its most basic form is that there are just two possibilities after death: either the soul is annihilated with the body, in which case it no longer exists; or else the soul survives, in which case it probably ascends to a higher plane of being. Either way there is nothing to fear: death will either be good, or it will be nothing. Cicero reviews Aristotle's comments on the nature of the soul. The idea he seems to like best is that of an impression on wax. He does not explicitly quote Aristotle's description of soul-to-body as shape-of-wax-to-wax, but instead takes another route: he begins by talking about memory, and then says that the soul is like wax in which experiences leave impressions. This is another place where Cicero goes on for a while about how the self is the soul, not the body; his connection of self with memory anticipates Augustine. Aristotle and especially the earlier Greek philosophers had been more interested in the soul as a motive force. Cicero seems interested in it as a passive receiver: the material that is molded by circumstances and events. He also goes on for a while about fame, claiming that the best men believe in, and seek, a continued existence after death through either propagation of children or through memorable or fame-worthy actions, or through art (poetry comes up again, and the Ennius quote about flying on the lips of men). Note that it is also in this text that Cicero reports having discovered Archimedes' burial place in Syracuse only because he "remembered some verses" that allowed him to identify the tomb.

Petrarch - Triumph of Fame

The first two "triumphs" that Petrarch wrote were "of Love" and "of Chastity." After Laura's death, he wrote the "Triumph of Death," and then, following it, the "Triumph of Fame"—"her who saves man from the tomb, and gives him life." Petrarch seems never to have quite completed this one, but to have still been in the editing process. What is mainly of interest is the list of persons he chooses to include in the procession. At the head of it are Scipio and Caesar; he says he can't tell which of them stands nearer to Fame herself. The majority are Romans. The Greeks he names mostly come from Homer or from myths. He names some biblical figures as well: David, Solomon, Jesus (he does not name any of these, but implies them by description). He lists various women, and a few more modern Europeans (King Arthur is among them). Then on the "other side" there are Greek philosophers and orators, and then various classical figures in politics, philosophy, history, mathematics. The conclusion is abrupt and seems to occur mid-poem. Some remarkable points: the famous men who stand nearest to Fame are mostly warriors. The vast majority of figures named or described are classical, more Roman than Greek. Jesus appears in a brief description several stanzas in, without any particular emphasis. He is presented as one of those who has won fame "by arms"; at least this must be inferred, since in Part III, Petrarch looks to "the other side" and is told that "'Tis not in arms alone that fame is won," as he sees the procession of men of letters. Plato is at their head, then Aristotle, then Pythagoras, then Socrates, Xenephon, Homer, Virgil, Cicero—etc. He says he cannot quite tell, due to the confusion, what order the rest were in (see Chaucer). In comparison to Chaucer, who makes the poets uphold the warriors, or Pope, who makes the warriors uphold the poets, Petrarch places them, apparently, in parallel formation, so that the chief men of letters are equal with the chief men of arms. Plato and Aristotle seem to be the equals of Caesar and Scipio. If one group is superior, it might be the warriors, since they come first in the sequence of the poem (and Fame herself seems to be standing nearer their party). But it is interesting that Petrarch seems to see literary fame and military fame as separate, rather than mutually dependent, and rather than making one subservient to the other. (It's also interesting that the list does not correspond with his Letters to Ancients; for example, Horace is not here, nor Seneca.)

The Art of Memory (Yates)

The latter chapters of this book are concerned with Giordano Bruno and the hermetic tradition; my interest is in the early chapters, which trace the ars memorativa from Greece and Rome into the middle ages and the early Renaissance. What is perhaps most interesting here as a point of discussion is Yates' discovery, as it were, of Petrarch as a figure who was, for a while, strongly associated with the ars memorativa. The source of this association seems to be a book Petrarch wrote called "Things to be Remembered" (Rerum memorandarum libri); the chief of the things to be remembered is "Prudence," as in other medieval memory systems. That Petrarch should have been interested in a system that was clearly important to Cicero is not too surprising, though his engagement with the subject clearly reflects the practice of his own time as well as Cicero's, using artificial memory as a pious part of "Prudence." Yates wonders whether Petrarch might have employed classical figures, however, as the "images" on which to place the things he wanted to remember. Albertus Magnus, among others, had used pagan images from classical poetry as memory aids, and Yates suggests that artificial memory may have been one medium through which pagan imagery survived in the middle ages. It would be difficult to prove that this is true (or that it is false), but it is certainly a point worth adding to the discussion of Simonides and the relationship between poetry, myth, and cultural memory.

Horace - Ars Poetica

The main point here will be the injunction to make poetry both useful and pleasing; the one who mingles utility with pleasure ("qui miscuit utile dulci") "is the one to cross the sea and extend to a distant day its author's fame." We can talk about Hardison and the "theory of praise," focusing more on the useful; then the shift, especially around Pope's era with print culture on the rise, to pay more heed to what is pleasing (and will sell) than to didacticism. We can note a touch of anxiety of influence in Horace's complaint about the schooling of Roman boys on arithmetic, in comparison to the natural poetic talent of the Greeks. "When once this canker, this lust of petty gain [inculcated by the schools] has stained the soul, can we hope for poems to be fashioned, worthy to be smeared with cedar-oil, and kept in polished cypress?" Romans, he implies, have too much love for gain, for material wealth, to become great and immortal poets. Another major point from the Ars Poetica is the injunction not to let gods interfere (nec deus intersit). Hugo alludes to this in the first book of Notre-Dame de Paris, as a joke, when the pasteboard-clad Jupiter appears onstage and saves the day. Other authors often mention this as well. Note that this text probably was not intended as a treatise; it appears to have been an epistle, possibly in response to news that one of its addressees was planning to write a drama; that would explain the focus on drama throughout the piece.

Ovid - Metamorphoses

The obvious thing to talk about would be either the description of Fame's house (rather brief, with the focus mainly on the confusion, noise, and chaos of rumor) and the highly Horatian conclusion. A less obvious thing to talk about would be the Dryden translation. There were two English translations prior to Dryden: the Golding translation (pre-Shakespeare, in fourteeners) and the Sandys translation (early 17th century, which Pope read in his youth). Both took an allegorical approach to the poem, and Sandys was seen as overly literal and prosaic. Dryden, at various times over the course of his life, wound up translating about a third of the Metamorphoses, and seemed to intend to do more, before his death in 1700. His publisher, Jacob Tonson, pulled together eighteen translators to complete a full version of the Metamorphoses, including Pope and Gay among them, as well as Addison, Congreve, and a handful of poets who would later become dunces in Pope's Dunciad. In fact, Pope attacked the new Metamorphoses translation in a satire, Sandys' Ghost, in which Sandys returns and is dismayed to see the poor poets whose work will replace his own. It is characteristic enough in Pope, to mock the thing and participate in it at the same time.

Temple - Essay Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning

The oldest works we have are still in their kind the best. Phalaris and Aesop as examples (he acknowledges that some people have considered Phalaris' epistles forgeries, but relies on his taste to determine the contrary). He lists off various accomplishments of the ancients, focusing on the classical world, but also mentioning Egypt, Chaldea, parts of Asia, and some of the northern barbarian peoples, whom he also sees as having produced a few worthy items.

Cibber - A Rhapsody Upon the Marvellous

The opening argument is that works should be famed for merit, not with regard to their age. Cibber asks the ancients to throw down their "shield of rusty age" and fight squarely, and implies that Milton may prove a greater poet than Homer, Dryden than Pindar, etc.—he mentions "even" Pope as having improved upon Horace. (He then adds parenthetically that Pope should be conscience-stricken hearing this praise from one he so often attacks. The poem was published in '51, however; Pope had died in '44.) Shakespeare, he says, outshines all classical bards. He points out that it is unclear what great moral deeds should make Horace or Pindar so great. It is against these two, Horace and Pindar, that he chiefly rails. There are some rather comically Byronesque bits here, with purposely silly rhymes and a purposely cavalier, conversational style. Although Pope would have objected strongly to the attacks on Horace and Pindar, and certainly Homer, it is interesting that the basic argument Cibber is making is not so different from one Pope would otherwise have agreed with: to honor a work because of its age, its "rust" (one wonders if Cibber repeats this favorite image of Pope's deliberately), was absurd. But from Pope's point of view, it is the moderns who see nothing valuable in the ancients except their age; from Cibber's, it is the "ancients" who are blinded to the faults of ancient authors by their age. Both demand the same thing: a fair estimation of all works based on their merits. But where Pope sees or fears a descent from the Golden Age downward, Cibber seems to be hopeful, like the new scientists, that time means progress.

Pope - Preface to the Works

The preface, it's been noted, seems to want to adopt two different stances: poetry is presented as both trifling and important, an idle pastime and also a great deal of work. This dual stance is prompted by the difficulty of maintaining the traditional image of the non-mercenary artist-poet in an age of commercial literature. To write for pay is to reduce the art of poetry to a trade. The most interesting point may be Pope's explicit association of "immortality" with "industry" ("if we have applied the same industry, let us expect the same immortality"). Pope adopts a classical pose by claiming that the reward of "industry" is not money but "immortality" (much as Cicero in On Duties regards fame/glory as the reward owed to noble deeds, and tries to make its pursuit compatible with humility). The appeal to the verdict of posterity, and the frequent references to the standards of the Ancients, also serve to distance Pope from the commercial present. This, he seems to want to proclaim, is not a book written for bookstalls to vend; this is a book written for the ages. In modesty, however, Pope several times remarks that he does not think his poems will last, since they do not meet even his own standards (he says), and also because the English language is so changeable, not stable and universal like Greek and Latin. Once again, fragmentation, diversity, individualism rise as threats to immortality, which depends upon a certain amount of changelessness and uniformity (the universal, static, stable)—a changelessness we can of course identify as monumental/epitaphic, as compared with living language in flux.

Swift - Gulliver's Travels

The satire on the Royal Society, which makes up much of Book III, ties in with our general discussion of Faust and the Enlightenment (and hence with Milton). The Academy of Projectors in Lagado is, like the Royal Society and like Bentley, focused on matters which Swift considers abstract, theoretical, trivial, and often useless or even backwards, and that have no practical application or moral value. The problem is infecting literature as well as scholarship and science: the books in Lagado, which are generated randomly, in some measure resemble the Tale; that is, they will naturally be full of short sections of comprehensible text, but will have no overarching theme. The Enlightenment practice of augmenting the microscopic (filling whole books or treatises, for example, with things like A General History of Ears) is probably best exemplified in Brobdignag, where Gulliver's size makes him a kind of walking microscope, and causes him to discover the vulgarity of everything around him, and prevents him from observing any beauties. However, it may be more important to note that there are other, equally compelling ways to read Brobdignag. It might be mocking the people of Brobdignag for thinking themselves clean merely because they have failed to observe themselves closely, rather than mocking Gulliver for having become restricted to such a narrow view that he can only see the irregularity of particulars, and not the harmony of their general union. The readings are in fact both strongly implied. Perhaps the point is that multiple readings are not only possible but even necessary; Swift refuses to offer a single, consistent message or metaphor. Perhaps he does it, as in the Tale, deliberately to baffle critical interpretation; perhaps he also does it, as in the Tale, to mock the failure of modern books to conform to rules of theme, consistency, or even readability. Either way, the result is a story that baffles critical explication. It may be worth noting Borges' story "A Weary Man's Utopia," in which the narrator spends a brief time in a future utopia; the man he meets speaks only Latin, and says that in the four hundred years he has lived, he has read no more than six books, one of them Gulliver's Travels (which he says many people believe to be true), and adds that reading is not important, only rereading—and that printed books are no longer made, as printing tended to multiply copies of unnecessary texts. The implication is that it would take many rereadings to really read Gulliver's Travels, if indeed it can ever be "read."

Swift - A Tale of a Tub

There are a lot of ways to get at this via other texts. Regarding the immortality angle, I'm chiefly interested in the descriptions of "immortal" books and the address to "Prince Posterity." One way to go is with Gulliver's Travels and the Struldbrugs, comparing them with books/language in the Tale and in the proposal for correcting and fixing the language. That might be the simplest angle here.

Milton - Familiar Epistles

There are two letters here that I will note. In a letter to Carlo Deodati, in the late 30s, Milton says he is meditating "an immortality of fame." He adds that he is "letting my wings grow and preparing to fly; but my Pegasus has not yet feathers enough to soar aloft in the fields of air." Hence the reference appears to be to a work of poetry, probably the epic he was planning to write, which had not yet taken shape as Paradise Lost. There is a certain air of jesting about the confession, yet it also seems to be quite true, as testified by the fact that he was meditating an epic poem without yet knowing what poem it would be (it seems that the writing of an epic was what drew him, not the theme of Paradise Lost), and given his comments in the poem he writes on turning twenty-three (in which "no bud or blossom sheweth" of the great work that he feels he must in time accomplish). He has clearly had "an immortality of fame" in mind for a long time. The other letter I'll mention is to Leonard Philaras, an Athenian who had promised to relay the details of his blindness to an eye doctor of his acquaintance. Milton obliges with the details, but adds that he does not expect or look for a cure, and cannot complain, since his blindness has given him all the keener intellectual sight. We might comment on this in relation to Plato's Phaedo, and the body as a prison of the soul, wherein the senses (especially pains and pleasures) are like nails that rivet the soul to the body; but the wise man should seek to forget the body and things seen as much as possible, in favor of the unseen world of the divine. In other words, the self seems to become more consciously itself in the absence of material distractions, including sight and hearing, which Socrates calls false witnesses, reporting what seems and not what is.

Hugo - The Minds and the Masses

There is a lot here. The basic points to keep in mind are these: Hugo announces the aims of post-Revolution literature as a popular literature that will cultivate and elevate the people, and effectively create "the people" out of what was previously the crowd, the mob. On the one hand, he insists that the great art of the past is dead, that revolutions (especially those that seek to level the classes) reject all ancestors. On the other hand, he says that the great writers of the past—Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare—should be "thrown" deep into the human soul, that Homer should be taught to peasants from the pulpits. The reconciliation comes toward the end of the essay, when Hugo says that it is not possible to surpass the great authors of the past, but that it is possible to equal them, and that to do so, new artists must follow not their footsteps but their example, which is to say, the example of originality—of not following; of creating anew, of contemplating creation directly, and not in the mirror of any prior art. The new art will not be like the old art. This clearly is the full embrace of the trends we have been seeing over the whole prior century in England (since roughly the Glorious Revolution), inspired with new force and immediacy by the French Revolution. Hugo sees more clearly, and embraces more fully than most authors before him, the shift toward individualism, the populace, the particular, the real. It is worth noting, however, that one of his aims (he says in his essay on Sir Walter Scott) is actually to turn literature a little bit back: Scott has created something wonderfully real, but according to Hugo, the ideal is even more necessary, and what the novel, as a genre, needs, is a reinfusion of the ideal. It needs to be Scott and also Homer. That is what he sets out to create.

Chaucer - House of Fame

Three books, the third incomplete. In the first book, the narrator falls asleep, and sees the story of Aeneas depicted in stone relief. In the second, he is taken up by a golden eagle (like that which appears to Dante in a brief dream in the Inferno), which explains that it is taking him to the House of Fame, as a reward for his efforts as a writer; he expects to find some fodder for stories there. The eagle explains that every sound men make is carried up to the House of Fame—he mentions Aristotle and Plato, describing the House of Fame as the proper place for the element of sound to inhabit. The eagle assures him, since he is afraid, that Jupiter has no intention to turn him into a star "yet," and also offers to teach him about the stars; but he declines this knowledge. In the third book, then, he passes through the House of Fame: a castle with a tower, on a foundation of ice. This poem, more so than any other of Chaucer's works, is characterized by confusion and inconsistency. The three books bear strangely little relation to one another; the eagle is excessively garrulous; the shifts between pathos and comedy are abrupt and frequent; the House of Fame itself is full of motley bustling characters. In some sense the poem's qualities are dream-like, but since this poem is more chaotic than Chaucer's other dream poems (The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fouls, etc.), it is reasonable to assume that the poem's chaos also reflects a particular view of fame. If Chaucer's House of Fame is a memory palace, it cannot be a very effective one, since everything there seems to be in perpetual motion. It suggests not a static museum of the eternally-famous, but the fluctuating fame of countless figures across various times and cultures. Like the books in Swift's Battel, they are both lively and, in a sense, mortal: they continue to struggle and bustle and meet challenges, and their place is never secure. Consider, also, more generally, the parallel between life/death and waking/dreaming—the underworld and the gates of dreams in Virgil, for instance; the conversation with the dead Scipio in Cicero's "dream." There is perhaps another form of the epitaphic chiasmus here, where the dead seem to wake while the living dream, or where the meaning of "waking" is reversed—note that the golden eagle first addresses "Geffrey" by telling him to "awake," though he is, according to his own report, just properly beginning to dream. An aside: Ruth Evans notes that the century before Chaucer's time had seen dramatic changes in textual formatting—in page layouts, opening paragraphs, marginal comments, notes, hand-shaped markers, alphabetized indices, and so on. So it might also be possible to talk about the correlation between mnemonic systems and text formats, and to ask, as Plato's Phaedrus suggests we might, whether such a change would serve as an aid to memory or a replacement for it.

Milton - Areopagitica

Two points here. First: as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Books can be dangerous, true; but they also contain the essence of their authors, and more than that, they contain the "fifth" essence, reason itself, and to kill a book is in some sense to kill reason, that feature of man by which he most resembles God. Second: Virtue is not "cloistered virtue," but rather tested, tempted, tried virtue. God put the tree in the garden in order to make man face a test and develop through facing it; the knowledge of both good and evil was bound up in one fruit because they are known each by the other, and therefore so far as it is possible to eliminate the knowledge of sin, just so far one also eliminates virtue itself. In other words, the possibility of error and sin are necessary for the practice of virtue; there is no choice, no freedom, no free will, no exercise of rationality, unless men are allowed to act and choose freely where sins and evils are available options. Thus a man must face bad books and evil ideas if he is to be good. Otherwise his goodness will only be a negative virtue, an omission of sin, rather than a choosing to reject it. The position certainly can be seen as problematic. It seems to run counter to the usual prayer "lead me not into temptation," as for instance Augustine would have it, believing that he was saved more by grace than by his own choices, because God, if He wished, could certainly offer temptations impossible for Augustine to resist. As we know from De Doctrina Christiana, Milton takes the common view that God will never offer a temptation too great for a given person to endure; the trials He offers are always such as his creations could theoretically overcome (though what exactly is meant by this "could" is certainly difficult to understand, given God's foreknowledge of the outcome). Anyway, Milton places high intellectual demands on those who would be saved. He seems to have no interest in a religion that would grant salvation merely according to faith; for him, it is necessary that one should be tested against an enemy. No wonder Satan plays such an important role in Paradise Lost—in some sense, virtue turns out to be impossible without him.

Cicero Refused to Die: Ciceronian Influence Through the Centuries (van Deusen)

Various authors discuss how Cicero "consciously wrote himself into history," in a number of ways: as a civic model and political figure, as a moral authority, as a philosophical thinker, as a master of literary style and the art of oratory. He also sought to be "visible" in more material ways; for example, he is known to have had at least eight villas. (But see Braudy for more on Cicero and "visibility.") The fact that he "consciously" intended his various works and acts as potential sources of immortality is important here. He never stops harping on the possibility of his being remembered by future generations. Most authors of the period are a little more modest (by Plutarch's time it had become commonplace to criticize Cicero's immodesty), but Cicero makes it clear that he intensely wants the afterlife of cultural memory. His career offers almost a sort of catalog of classical modes of achieving that.

Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram (Baumbach)

Various authors examine the "spatial, religious, historical, and political" contexts of ancient epigrams and explore various aspects of the rhetoric of epigram, including the problem of the identity of speakers and addressees, questions about the "voice" of epigrams, and the convention of the "passerby." They discuss epitaph as a dialogue with the passerby, its narrative strategies to attract readers, and its presumed orality. Mainly what's interesting here is the rhetorical sophistication and complexity of epitaph poetry in ancient Greece (note for example the tendency of epitaph to identify itself, the text/stone, rather than the dead, as the "speaker"; "I am a stone on top of Kretho"). The main function of epitaph, however, is deictic: memory operates by pointing here and forcing the passerby, or reader, to interact in some way with specifically what is absent yet nevertheless identified somehow by the act of pointing. The basic idea of the self as that which is absent after death, and the idea that that self is in some manner preserved by being "remembered"—pointed out to a living person—are already in place. Text/signs already offer a kind of immortality. An interesting note: epitaph collections first appeared in the 4th century BC. The early appearance of epitaph collections suggests a) the importance of preservation as a cultural phenomenon, and b) that text might already be perceived as more durable than monument (contra Hugo, who thinks this only happened with the advent of print).

Dillon Wentworth - Essay on Translated Verse

Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon was one of England's first translation theorists. His Essay on Translated Verse notes that it is often the effort of translating a text that reveals its obscurity, since producing a faithful translation requires an intimate familiarity not only with the text itself, but with the underlying "thought" by which the author has sought to animate it: "For none explain more clearly than they know." A true translation should leave a text "unperplex'd." He finds it safer to leave things out of a translation than to interpolate any new material. We might discuss here his two translations of Horace's Ode 1.22. He follows his own advice in a rather odd way, to say the least. His description of the occasion for the poem is purely speculative (yet was later adopted by some other editors without explanation or credit to him). His translation is fairly loose, and his imitation, read together with the translation, clarifies his interpretation of the poem, which, like Milton's "Comus," focuses on chastity as the prime celebrated virtue. Unlike most other interpreters, though, the Earl of Roscommon does connect virtue with poetry; ultimately he seems to argue that the poet is able to subdue his passions—which are like wild beasts and other adversities—by the charm of poetry, like charming Cerberus with music; he makes them "roar in verse," and thus subdues them, so that poetry and chastity are, for him, linked together.

Wordsworth - Essays Upon Epitaphs

Wordsworth's basic point here is that it is worse for an epitaph-writer to make the error of working up an epitaph with too much "art," at the expense of feeling, than to display an exuberance of feeling that may render the epitaph somewhat ridiculous (though this of course is also a fault, and though he also especially advises against including any too-transitory feeling in an epitaph, which is intended as a permanent record, not just a memory for the mourners but a memory for all posterity). A character sketch, applauding the virtues of the deceased, is too vague and fails to move the reader. A perfect epitaph should include enough particularity to evoke a sense of the character implicitly, and the feeling should touch the universal (it should perhaps even be cliché in itself), but should be presented in such a way as to strike the reader forcefully all the same. Wordsworth objects most particularly to the epitaphs written by Pope, whom he sees as almost the epitome of a preference to "art" over "nature," and of a failure to invest in his epitaphs the true feelings of a mourner. Of course, Wordsworth chooses one of Pope's less successful epitaphs (though he defends the choice fairly, by pointing it out as a favorite of Johnson's). It is worth noting that Pope has some epitaphs that would probably register as sincere enough, even in Wordsworth's measure; though admittedly there are a number that would not. The problem, though, seems less to be in Pope himself than in the tendencies to artificiality that his style of poetry prompted in others, who could imitate him only by a kind of mannered affectation, missing the underlying power and sense that made his works poetry and not mere verse. Wordsworth is right enough to point out Lyttleton's poem as an example of an epitaph that misguidedly seeks to imitate Pope's style, with unfortunate results. Still, quibbling aside, the piece is interesting because it draws such particular attention to the reasons why, in the estimation of most Romantics, Pope's efforts at immortalization (of others and of himself) failed: in spite of his own continual advocacy of "naked nature" as the only true art, Pope is too artificial for Romantic sensibilities, too overwrought, too cold, too careful. Wordsworth dislikes that Pope's words are the "dress" of thought, rather than the corporeal body of thought. De Man is right to point out that Wordsworth can no more overcome the problem of sign and signifier than Pope can, and that Wordsworth demands for words to perform precisely what is impossible for them; but then, Wordsworth is also right that the persistent effort to overcome that impossibility is the necessary act of communication, especially epitaphic communication.