But any prose translation of Virgil is doomed to failure if we believe Coleridge and Tennyson – who also effectively inform anyone rash enough to attempt a poetic version that language and metre are all that count. In the late twentieth century this conjunction produced a number of excellent translations of Homer, so that anyone who wishes to read the Iliad or the Odyssey in English is faced with an embarrassment of riches. Eventually, of course, the linguistic and narrative qualities that Arnold praised became those prized by modernist poetics.

Lawrence can still be read as something more than period pieces. It is remarkable that even the versions of Samuel Butler and T. E. The Homeric qualities that Arnold singles out can all be got across as well or possibly better in prose than in poetry and in fact Homer has nearly always been well served by translators in both forms. I do not think that we can overestimate the influence of these three verdicts. In the meantime, Matthew Arnold had praised Homer's rapidity, plainness, and directness of thought and expression, as well as his nobility (while finding Virgil ‘inadequate’ – an Arnoldian technical term that is perhaps not as pejorative as the vernacular, but is hardly meant as praise). Coleridge's sour judgement that Virgil was all ‘language and metre’ was later, in effect, echoed and ratified in Tennyson's praise (‘lord of language’, ‘stateliest measure’). Infatuation with Homer's ‘original genius’ ushered in a long-lasting dissatisfaction with the Aeneid. The Romantics and the Victorians must answer for this.

But subsequent efforts met with less success. Dryden's version is a classic English poem in its own right, comparable to Pope's Homer.

Soon after Douglas, Surrey's Book 4 helped establish blank verse as the proper measure of heroic poetry in our language. Douglas’ Scots translation remains vigorous and illuminating after the passage of five hundred years. Centuries ago, the Aeneid found effective, sympathetic, innovative, and even gifted translators whose work left an indelible mark on English literature and indeed helped determine its course in several important respects. The history of Virgil translations is a curious one.

The aeneid fitzgerald