The Classical Tradition by Gilbert Highet

Author:Gilbert Highet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press

§4. ENGLAND

‘We are all Greeks.’

SHELLEY1

The lands of Greece and Rome and their civilization were only one of the many excitements under which the English revolutionary writers produced their marvellously varied work; and on each of them that excitement acted in a different way. In order to determine what it did for English literature, we must see what it meant for each of the great poets of that time. But let us take it at its highest intensity. Wordsworth wrote two sonnets on a theme he found in Plutarch:2 true; still, the poems are bad, and facts like that are not truly revealing. We must rather ask, how did Greece and Rome change the minds of these poets? from the classics, what did they get that was, for them, uniquely valuable?

We think of William Wordsworth as an observer of nature and of natural man. The mountains which ennobled his boyhood and strengthened his manhood (it is inadequate to call him a ‘Lake poet’: he was a Mountain poet; there have been very few, and he was the greatest), the mountains which in physical nature were the counterpart of the lofty spiritual ideals by which he lived; the lakes in which he swam and on which he skated and rowed (always surrounded by the dominating mountains), the lakes which symbolized the soft gracious influence of his sister and his wife; the trees and flowers, the fields, the men and women who worked the land and wandered over it, that visible proof of the world’s divinity,

the infinite magnificence of heaven;3

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