The book reveals the extent to which writers we call “romantic” venerate and use the classics to serve their own ends in transforming poetry, epic, the novel, mythology, politics, and issues of race, as well as in practicing translation and reshaping models for a literary career and personal life. On both sides of the Atlantic the classics—including the surprising influence of Hebrew, regarded then as a classical language—play a major role in what becomes labeled Romanticism only much later in the nineteenth century. The relation between classic and romantic is not one of opposition but of a s ... More

The book reveals the extent to which writers we call “romantic” venerate and use the classics to serve their own ends in transforming poetry, epic, the novel, mythology, politics, and issues of race, as well as in practicing translation and reshaping models for a literary career and personal life. On both sides of the Atlantic the classics—including the surprising influence of Hebrew, regarded then as a classical language—play a major role in what becomes labeled Romanticism only much later in the nineteenth century. The relation between classic and romantic is not one of opposition but of a subtle and deep interpenetration. Classical texts retain an enduring, but newly transformational presence. While romantic writers regard what they are doing as new, this attitude does not prompt them to abjure lessons of genre, expression, and judgment flowing from classical authors they love. Their view is Janus-faced. Aside from one essay on Coleridge, the volume does not address major canonical British poets. Considerable work on their relation to the classics exists. Writers treated in detail include William Gilpin, Phillis Wheatley, Robert Lowth, Walter Savage Landor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, James McCune Smith, Herman Melville, S. T. Coleridge, and Edward Gibbon. Four chapters each treat multiple authors from both sides of the Atlantic. Topics include the picturesque, political rhetoric, epic invocation, mythology, imitation, ekphrasis, slavery, feminism, history and historiography, and the innovative influence of ancient Hebrew, especially its poetry.