VI - SUGGESTIONS INTRODUCTORY TO A STUDY OF THE AENEID

Summary

The following remarks are offered as a contribution to the interpretation of a poem to which a great deal of recent criticism has, I venture to think, been unjust. Much has been said of the artificial and borrowed element in the Aeneid, very little of the original element; and yet it is clear that a poet who won the ear of his nation so soon as Vergil, and became at once one of the most popular poets and the most classical poet of Rome, could not have gained this position without great original power. Because Vergil chose a vast and multitudinous material to work upon some critics have supposed that he showed no creative power in handling it; as if he had not created a new kind of epic and a new poetical language; as if any other Roman poet before him had attempted so vast and so difficult a problem, and as if any epic poet of his nation after him had succeeded in anything like the same way in holding the attention of mankind. Mere rhetorical skill has never made and can never make a work immortal.