Classical Influences On English Poetry

First published in 1951 this book presents a comprehensive account of the classical influences on English poetry with illustrative examples. This is a sequel to Thomson’s book on Classical Background of English Literature. The author brings important themes like Homer and epic tradition in antiquity; Milton and epic tradition in modern times; didactic poetry; lyric poetry; elegiac poetry; satire and comedy; and the epigram. This is an interesting read for students of English literature and general readers interested in English poetry.

First published in 1988, this study explains how certain genres created by Classical poets were adapted and sometimes transformed by the poets of the modern world, beginning with the Tudor poets’ rediscovery of the Classical heritage. Most of the long-lived poetic genres are discussed, from familiar examples like the hymn, elegy and eulogy, to less familiar topics such as the recusatio (refusal to write certain kinds of poems), or formal structures such as priamel. By combining criticism with literary history, the author explores the degree to which certain poets were consciously imitating models, and demonstrates how various generic forms reflect the literary concerns of individual poets as well as the general concerns of their age. The poets discussed range over the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity, and in English from Wyatt to Yeats and Auden. A detailed and fascinating title, this study will appeal to teachers and students of both English and Classical literature.

Back in print after 17 years, this is a concise history of rhetoric as it relates to structure, genre, and style, with special reference to English literature and literary criticism from Ancient Greece to the end of the 18th century. The core of the book is a quite original argument that the figures of rhetoric were not mere mechanical devices, were not, as many believed, a "nuisance, a quite sterile appendage to rhetoric to which (unaccountably) teachers, pupils, and writers all over the world devoted much labor for over 2,000 years." Rather, Vickers demonstrates, rhetoric was a stylized representation of language and human feelings. Vickers supplements his argument through analyses of the rhetorical and emotional structure of four Renaissance poems. He also defines 16 of the most common figures of rhetoric, citing examples from the classics, the Bible, and major English poets from Chaucer to Pope.

From the introductory. In dealing particularly with any period of literary history it is, I think, in the first place, desirable to consider, at least in its broader outlines, that which preceded it; as we are thus better enabled to estimate not only the developmental influences which have evolved its production, but also the causes of which such development is the result. In briefly considering therefore the Lake Poets and their influence on English poetry, I shall glance backward for a moment to the so-called Classical School which the Lake Poets superseded, and against which the latter so vigorously protested. The germs of Classicism in our literature may be said to have been introduced during the glorious Elizabethan era, during which the discovery of printing, and the consequent diffusion of the Greek and Roman classics, and the works of Italian and French writers, by means of translations, not only excited a general taste for elegant reading, but exerted the genial influences of literature upon a class of readers who had never previously been subject to them. England, however, was late in cultivating classical learning, as English literature was slower still in yielding to classical influences. The great stream of Elizabethan literature gushed forth from a native source, and with such power that it resisted the influence of the classics even after they had begun to be studied in England.

A reissue in paperback of a title first published in 1949.