“Having dared to touch with bloody hands the verses”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Embodied Approach to the Homeric Corpus

“Having dared to touch with bloody hands the verses”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Embodied Approach to the Homeric Corpus Allison Scheidegger Reising (bio) In an 1845 letter to Anne Thomson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter EBB) expresses serious reservations about the value of classical learning, particularly for women: the Greek language [. . .] swallows up year after year of studious life. Now I have a “doxy” . . . that there is no exercise of the mind so little profitable to the mind, as the study of languages. It is the nearest thing to a passive recipiency . . is it not? . . as a mental action— though it leaves one as weary as ennui itself.1 EBB worries that popularizing “the mere fashion of scholarship among women” would be “disagreeable” and “worse than vain,” and wishes that English women would read and appreciate con temporary poets. Yet in the year she wrote this seeming disavowal, EBB was engaged in multiple short translations from Greek commissioned by Thomson herself, as well as a complete retranslation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.2 In her case at least, learning Greek did not lull her mind into mere “passive recipiency.” In this essay, I suggest that EBB’s scholarly relationships, critical practices, and short Homeric translations can help us reconcile her expressed concerns regarding classical study with her own avid scholarly practice and frequent re-encounters with Greek texts. EBB’s embodied imagining of the Homeric text and Homeric criticism enables her to take a nurturing and expansive approach that stands in contrast to the pedantic and limiting focus on textual purity common in the classical scholarship of her time. At least part of EBB’s expressed ambivalence about classical scholarship stemmed from lingering embarrassment over her first translation of Prometheus [End Page 161] Bound, published in 1833, which she described to her friend Mary Russell Mitford as a “hard dry unvital translation” that failed “poetically,” albeit not “scholastically.” After describing her mortification that this translation had been published and was still receiving public attention, EBB critiques what she calls “linguaism”: As for the ancient languages, or any acquirement in the particular department of languages, you cant [sic] think how little I care for it. It puts me out of patience to see people glorying, evidently however silently, in the multitudes of grammars, when the glorious rich literature of our own beloved England lies by their side without a look or a sigh that way. And then a dictionary life is the vainest & least exalting of lives. No occupation claims the time which the acquisition of a language does, with an equal non-requital to the intellect. Further on in this letter, however, EBB moderates her critique of “linguaism” in a way that gives clues as to why, in spite of “how little” she claims to care for skill in “the ancient languages,” she would go on to translate Prometheus Bound twice, and even revise that second revision twice over the following six years: there are you know, peculiar aptitudes to languages, which like other talents cry out for cultivation. For my own part, my learning Greek was a child’s fancy . . achieved for Homer’s sake; & for Homer’s sake, . . that is, for poetry’s generally, I have never repented one year of my hard working ones.3 For EBB, learning Greek was both “a child’s fancy” and hard work engaged in for the sake of personal encounter with Homer, and therefore with poetry—an unmistakable assertion of the relevance of classical genius for modern poetry. Although the influence of Greek on EBB’s poetics is generally taken as lasting and pervasive, her scholarly work still tends to be construed as a necessary but insipid apprenticeship for her later project of writing a modern English epic in Aurora Leigh (1857). Clara Drummond, for example, argues that for EBB the pursuits of poetry and classical scholarship were “inseparable,” but also assumes that classical scholarship is unimaginative in contrast with poetry: “a serious study of Greek requires a meticulous and assiduous nature, while composing serious poetry requires a passionate and imaginative one, and a sensitivity to the sublime.” 4 Jennifer Wallace has observed that feminist scholars’ anxiety about women writers trying...