<i>A Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795–1821</i>. Henry Stead. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xv+338.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewA Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795–1821. Henry Stead. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xv+338.Andrew ElfenbeinAndrew ElfenbeinUniversity of Minnesota—Twin Cities Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe classical learning shared by many of the Romantic period’s major authors is inaccessible to most contemporary scholars. Whatever the defects of the period’s schooling, it produced generations of writers with an intimate knowledge of classical literature that would daunt all but the best current classicists. Even John Keats, without the benefit of a university education, still had an impressive facility with Latin. For all the work of scholars in the past three decades to historicize the period’s literature, a fundamental aspect of its history, the monumental presence of the classics as the foundation of the period’s literary sensibilities, remains understudied. J. Douglas Kneale (Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999]), Yopie Prins (Victorian Sappho [Princeton University Press, 1999]), and Kevis Goodman (Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediations of History [Cambridge University Press, 2004]) have offered the most thought-provoking paths for understanding the classicism of the Romantic period, but a great deal more can and should be done.When American presses are making specialized scholarly publication increasingly difficult, Oxford University Press has committed to a series on Classical Presences, devoted to the importance of classical literature for later periods. For this series, Henry Stead has written A Cockney Catullus: The Reception of Catullus in Romantic Britain, 1795–1821. He begins by looking at the two major translations of Catullus in the period by John Nott (1795) and George Lamb (1821) and provides extensive, generous analysis. Although he has useful things to say about both, his heart is with the more scholarly Nott, whose edition includes both the Latin and extensive annotation, rather than the sheepishly respectable Lamb, published by John Murray. The energy of the chapter comes from watching both translators contort themselves in the face of Catullus’s barrage of witty obscenity; Stead is a commendably unsqueamish guide to what is hidden and what is not. The second chapter engages Catullus 64, an unusually long (for Catullus) poem about the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, accompanied by numerous digressions. While the idea of focusing on a single poem is intriguing, this chapter struggles because allusions to the poem in the Romantic period are heavily mediated by other sources and, for the most part, play a small role in poems when they do appear. Given what Stead does elsewhere in the book, Catullus 63 might have been a better choice, in part because it received at least three translations during the period, by Francis Hodgson (1809), Leigh Hunt (1811), and “Cenalto” in the Bristol Memorialist (1823).Although the book’s title foregrounds the Cockney reception, Stead’s third chapter focuses on the non-Cockney reception of Catullus. The best material here analyzes Walter Savage Landor, the most accomplished classicist of the writers examined. Stead explores Landor’s close, learned engagement with Catullus in his neo-Latin poetry and shows how skillfully Landor adapts Catullus’s aggressive style. As for the other poets discussed (William Wordsworth, Thomas Moore, and Lord Byron), Stead is hampered by the relative insignificance of their direct translations of Catullus and his sometimes scolding attitude toward their translating skill. In the case of a poet like Byron, for whom direct translation of Catullus mattered less than a vaguer, less easily pinpointed Catullan sensibility, Stead’s hermeneutic holds him back from broad exploration.The book’s strongest chapter centers on Leigh Hunt, who created the Cockney Catullus of the book’s title, the “feminized and politically active alternative classicism, which supported Hunt’s campaign for political and social reform” (229). Stead patiently analyzes all Hunt’s Catullan translations and argues well for Hunt’s project of making the classics broadly available to a new public. He looks in detail at the translations of Catullus 31, 38, and 45 appended to The Feast of Poets (1814), as well as versions of these translations that Hunt had published previously. In an especially revealing move, he uses the correspondence between Hunt and Henry Brougham, in which Brougham provided detailed comments about Hunt’s translations. At such moments, Romantic authors provide Stead with the detailed, word- and phrase-level attention to language that makes him most comfortable, and his comments are consistently illuminating. He also looks at Hunt’s translation of Catullus 63, mentioned earlier, whose powerful, disturbing story Hunt recontextualizes as an attack on Methodist enthusiasm.The Keats chapter, by contrast, is less successful. Stead defends Keats’s classical knowledge and sensitively describes the indirect quality of Keatsian allusion: Keats “often carefully submerged his sources so that when, and if, they were detected, the detection would serve to intrigue and occasionally reward the initiated reader, but at the same time it would not overwhelm or break the surface of the primary meaning” (271). Yet he struggles to move that description into practical criticism, in part because his comfort zone remains close translation. The links that he draws between Keats and Catullus are so profoundly mediated by other poets that a good description of them would require an interpretive framework quite different from the one that he creates. Moreover, as Stead acknowledges, Jeffrey N. Cox’s excellent work on Cockney classicism in Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Their Circle (Cambridge University Press, 1998) has made many of the substantial points already.Overall, much as I admire Stead’s enthusiasm for Latin poetry and his nuanced understanding of Catullus, the book convinced me that isolating a single author like Catullus is not the most effective way to study the importance of the classics for the Romantic period. As Stead himself notes, Catullus often appears during the period in constellations of other Latin poets, such as Horace and Propertius; he mattered less on his own than as part of a distinctive sector of the classical past, the Latin lyric. A book that widened its scope, not to the entirety of the classical inheritance but just to a more revealing portion of it, would have had an easier time justifying the more than three hundred pages that Stead spends on Catullus. I look forward to future work on Romanticism and Latinity from Stead because his fine, detailed knowledge of the classical canon should enable him to provide scholars of the period with insights available to few others. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 3February 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/694799HistoryPublished online September 26, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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