Title: 01 - The Romantics and Classical Greece
Course: English 4A SU15 > Section: Unit: It's Greek to Me

The Why: Introduction to this unit

What you do in this unit is important because in many of the units that follow you will see references to these materials.

The references to Greek myth are likely encountered on an almost daily basis. From the names of celestial bodies to the products we buy. It is deeper than that though. The philosophies developed in the times this culture evolved still influence us today. Right or wrong, knowing the origins of something often help you to better understand how we got to the place we are now.

You may also be wondering by now, “Why, in a course that is supposed to center on British Literature, are we spending so much time on ancient myths?” Good question. Context is important. While there is no time to provide all of the context (either literary or historical) necessary to fully understand the works presented in this class, it is a good idea to have at least a surface understanding of the references and related stories that the authors were using. So many writers from British Literature were educated in the stories of ancient Greece that it would have been natural for them to be influenced by those works and include references to them in their own writing.

So, why would a student from some town in Minnesota in the 21st century even need to understand the connections made here? Regardless of time, place or culture, the stories here connect us and provide for us themes and character traits that help us give meaning to our own circumstances. Seeing ourselves reflected in these stories helps us relate to the world around us and the people in it.

It may be that you are neither Greek, nor British (if you are then it may be even more motivating to learn about your heritage!) What kinds of topics do you think people struggle with regardless of their culture? What are some universal similarities that we all share just because we are human? We may all have more in common with these writers from long ago then we might realize!

School of Athens by Raphael via Wikimedia Commons / CC0

The Romantics and Classical Greece

The Romantic period was one of growing interest in ancient Greece. Stephen Hebron explores how this shaped the subject matter and forms of the era’s poets.

In the Romantic period it was taken for granted that the intellectual and artistic achievement of ancient Greece and Rome was one of the foundations of western culture. The Classical world permeated almost every aspect of life, from political institutions and philosophical enquiry to scientific method and the basic forms of architecture. The classics of Latin literature, such as Virgil’s Aeneid, the Odes of Horace and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were standard texts. At Hawkshead Grammar School, Wordsworth received a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin as part of his general education. At Christ’s Hospital school in London, Coleridge was discovered reading Virgil for pleasure and was made a ‘Grecian’, or scholar, and at Cambridge University won a medal for an ode in Greek. As a schoolboy, Keats decided to translate the whole of the Aeneid into English. Shelley was an excellent classicist, and sufficiently proficient in ancient Greek to make, as an adult, a fine translation of Plato’s Symposium.

 This excerpted article on The Romantics and Classical Greece by the British Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

The ruins of ancient Greece

The ways in which classical literature, art and philosophy inspired the thought of the Romantic poets influenced their subject matter and determined their verse forms, which are many and various. Of particular note, however, is the increasing interest that was taken in ancient Greece, often referred to as Hellenism. General knowledge of ancient Greek civilisation was greatly increased by publications such Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (translated into English by Henri Fuseli in 1765) and James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1762–1830). Greek art could also be seen at first hand in museums, most spectacularly at the British Museum, where from 1816 visitors could see the newly acquired Elgin Marbles. There was an enthusiasm for the ruins of Greece, one of the few countries that could be visited during the Napoleonic wars.

Ancient Greek poetry and visual art

Ancient Greek poetry and visual art was admired for its serenity and simplicity, and what was seen as a kind of elemental vigour and purity. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley described the culture of 5th-century Athens as a golden age:

… never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, and virtue, been developed; never was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in man.^1

His poetic drama Prometheus Unbound is directly influenced by ancient Greek drama, and especially the tragedies of Aeschylus. His elegy for John Keats,Adonais (1821) begins with an epigram attributed to Plato, and is rich in Platonic imagery.

^1Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York and London: W W Norton & Co., 2002), p. 518.

Keats and the ‘grecian Manner’

Keats, while he was planning ‘Hyperion’, a projected long poem on the overthrow of the Titans, told Benjamin Robert Haydon that he would write in a ‘naked and grecian Manner’ (Letters, I, 207). He soon abandoned ‘Hyperion’ however, deeming the language too unnatural. More successful was his inclusion in his shorter poems of figures from Greek mythology, which, like many non-Greek readers of the day, he learned about from Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, Tooke’s Pantheon and Spence’s Polymetis. He did this rather clumsily and sentimentally at first, in the manner of an early influence, Leigh Hunt, but his use of Greek myth in later poems such as the great odes of 1819 is exceedingly apt and successful.

Some writers, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, distrusted this attachment to Greek mythology, seeing it as an inappropriate preference for pagan mythology over Christianity. After hearing Keats read from Endymion Wordsworth commented drily that it was ‘a Very pretty piece of Paganism’.^1 Others were more savage, dismissing Keats as ill-educated, as someone who could only read Greek texts in translation and whose use of myth was presumptuous and lazy.

What we now consider the most original aspects of the Romantics’ use of the classical heritage were, at the time, often the most controversial and derided.

^ 1The Keats Circle, ed. by H E Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), ii, p.144.