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ROBIN SOWERBY. The Augustan Art of Poetry: Augustan Translation of the Classics. New York: Oxford, 2006. Pp. 368. $99.
The first of the four lengthy chapters comprising this detailed and well-argued study describes how Marcus Hieronymus Vida's neo-Latin poem De Arte Poetica (1527) codified the Roman Augustan poetic aesthetic so influential on Dryden and Pope. This is the "Immortal Vidal On whose honour'd Brow / The Poet's Bays and Critick's Ivy grow," to quote Pope's Essay on Criticism, yet how many of us have looked into Vida, even in translation? Fortunately Mr. Sowerby has, allowing us to profit from his close readings and his description of the Augustan aesthetic. He acknowledges early on that "the term 'Augustan' has very largely fallen out of fashion" when most new literary studies "are concerned with issues to do with race, gender, politics, [and] commercialization," but he believes, and clearly demonstrates, that "the term is still useful in drawing attention to a dominant set of aesthetic values shared by the main poets of the time and underlying their achievement."
Vida's Maronology (the cult worship of P Virgilius Maro, better known as Virgil) was inherited from the late Romans themselves and dominated throughout the Greekchallenged Renaissance. To illustrate Mr. Sowerby's approach throughout, where theorizing follows close reading, I offer his explication of these lines from Vida (from Christopher Pitt's 1724 translation):
Mincio's and Manto's glorious son behold,
Th' immortal Virgil, sheath'd in foreign Gold,
Shines out unsham'd, and towers above the Rest,
In the rich Spoils of godlike Homer dress 'd.
Mr. Sowerby comments, "Virgil's triumphant appearance unashamedly dressed in spoils stripped from Homer (the image is itself a Virgilian reminiscence of the vision of Hector dressed...