Classics in the Modernists' World

Abstract

While the range of Gregory Baker’s new work on Celtic Modernism and Classics is impressive, even more impressive is the web of interconnections that it calls forth. On the one hand, Baker uncovers the fascinating variety in the nationalist and language-revival movements of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries. On the other, he reveals the profound differences possible in the role of “Classics” in the modern world. Far from the normative view of a gradual disappearance of Greek and Latin as irrelevant to modernity—an issue Baker interestingly, and ably, leaves to his conclusion—we see, for example, Scotland, where the study of academic English prevailed early over Classics, Wales, which viewed itself as Roman, and Ireland, seen now as an oral culture on the verge of finding its Homer. In each case, Classics, which had served as a key instrument of the English ruling class, connects with movements supporting the national language against the over-powering encroachment of English. Again, this occurs in a variety of ways: in Wales linked to anti-industrialism, in Scotland to the divide between Lowland Lallans and Highland Gaelic, and in Ireland to a mythologized past. Moreover, as Baker points out, Classics’ “decline” in fact opened it up for different kinds of repurposing, while work such as that of Cornford and Harrison “superannuated in a stroke the Victorian Homer,” as Eliot put it (100) by bringing ethnography, archaeology, and cultural anthropology into Classics, radically changing the implications of its reception. To add another intriguing touch, the four writers treated here, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones, and Hugh Mac-