This notion of a progression from lighter to more serious matter was based on the so-called cursus Virgilius, the model of the Virgilian poetic career that began with pastoral (the Eclogues or Bucolics), proceeded to labor (the Georgics, poems about the work of farming), and climaxed in epic (the Aeneid, poetry of a nation).Read Virgilianus for Virgilius. The mistake is repeated in the index (p. 351).
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Tuesday, November 05, 2019
Mistake
Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 200-201: