Literary Translation as Cultural Affiliation: The Case of Victorian Poetry and Classical Verse Composition

Abstract The ability to translate English poetry into ancient Greek and Latin sat at the pinnacle of a Victorian classical education, but we rarely read the resulting Greek and Latin poetry as serious literature. Yet this corpus documents an important, culturally prestigious poetic practice that entrenched a narrative of cultural descent from Greece and Rome, affiliating modern British poetry with classical antecedents. Moreover, it taught generations of schoolboys (and some noteworthy schoolgirls) interpretive methods for understanding English poetry, thereby providing an arena in which the canon of English poets coalesced before the institutionalization of English literature in universities. I re-create the interpretive moves and cultural affiliations enacted through verse composition in the Victorian period, and I analyze particular verse compositions that shed new light on the classicizing context informing contemporary poetic creation.