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This article argues that Wordsworth's "Laodamia" demonstrates the shaping influence exercised by Virgil's Aeneid over the English poet's creative imagination. In its focus on the title character's devoted but ultimately self-destroying love for her husband Protesilaus, the first Greek warrior to die at Troy, "Laodamia" treats a theme that had long preoccupied Wordsworth as both a poet and a reader of Virgil. Wordsworth constructs his narrative around an allusive counterpoint with the Aeneid, echoing the distinctive stylistic patterns of Virgil's Latin while modifying, combining, and rearranging details from the epic's plot, particularly its two major episodes of doomed female love: Andromache's hopeless mourning at the tomb of Hector in book 3 and Dido's self-consuming passion for Aeneas in book 4. In the depth and the variety of its relationships with the Aeneid, "Laodamia" constitutes one of the most multifaceted examples in literary history of an English poet's creative engagement with the classical inheritance.
As Willard Spiegelman observed forty years ago, readers "have long felt the temperamental affinities of [William] Wordsworth with Virgil, his similar appreciation of a universal sorrow which touches and colors all mortal affairs."1 These affinities led the English poet to undertake two extended translations from his Latin predecessor over the course of his career. In 1788-89, while still a student at Cambridge, he translated and paraphrased sections scattered through all four books of Virgil's Georgics; in 1823-24, he rendered into English the first three books of the Aeneid in their entirety (as well as passages from books 4 and 8).2 Wordsworth's familiarity with Virgil encompassed not only the Latin originals but an array of other English translations from which he freely borrowed in his efforts, including at least four different versions of each poem.3 Bruce E. Graver has demonstrated that Wordsworth's own translations show an intimate familiarity with the nuances of Virgil's lines, whose effects he seeks to approximate in English through the use of a deliberately Latinate vocabulary, word order, and versification.4 Other scholars have traced the significance of this immersion in Virgil's works for a number of Wordsworth's most important original poems, arguing that "Michael" responds to the Georgics in its treatment of rural labor5 and that the "Immortality Ode" draws on Virgil's evocation of childhood and his vision...