Wordsworth's Aeneid and the Eighteenth-Century Tradition

What is it about?

This article examines the extent to which William Wordsworth's fragmentary translation of Virgil's Aeneid was influenced by earlier attempts at translating the Latin epic into English. Despite his outspoken criticism of John Dryden, the foremost Virgil translator of the previous age, Wordsworth followed him in using rhyming couplets, and his choice of words, too, has been shown to become more similar to Dryden's the further he progressed with the work on his own version. But Wordsworth also borrowed from a number of lesser-known translators, notably Joseph Trapp, who anticipated many of his supposed stylistic innovations. An important factor, moreover, was Wordsworth's correspondence with his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose comments informed the revisions he made before publishing part of the text and thus contributed to its conservative aesthetic.

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Why is it important?

Few readers may be aware that Wordsworth, one of the key figures of English Romanticism, not only composed original poetry but also tried his hand at a translation of the Aeneid. Even more so than some of his other works, this much-neglected experiment can be seen as a reaction against the neoclassical model of Dryden and Pope – poets who gained their lasting fame by translating Virgil and Homer, respectively. Previous discussions of Wordsworth's Aeneid have naturally tended to compare it with Dryden's celebrated couplet version, observing significant verbal parallels as well as programmatic differences; what has gone largely unnoticed, on the other hand, is his indebtedness to the tradition of blank verse renderings that had emerged over the course of the eighteenth century. The evolution of the text through successively revised manuscript drafts reflects the interplay of these various influences, which seem to have left the translator little room to fundamentally change the way Virgil had been presented in English up until that point. In the end, Wordsworth's inability to differentiate himself from his predecessors might help to explain why he abandoned the idea of translating the Aeneid in its entirety, and why only a short excerpt from the three completed books was published during his lifetime.

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