Word: vergil
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Clinton was a reconciler in the home and outside it, the responsible one whom other adults treated like their own son. The bandleader Vergil Spurlin became especially important to Clinton, whose major interest at the time was music. Looking back now, Clinton says, "He was a real good man, real religious, spent a lot of time with his kids, cared a lot about them." He was everything Clinton's stepfather was not, and once Clinton startled Spurlin by saying he really did not have a daddy of his own. The inscriptions "Billy" put in Spurlin's yearbooks are eloquent...
...pastoral mode is a dream of escape. It rises, in literature, with a resentment of big-city life -- in the Alexandrian period, around 250 B.C.; two centuries later, with Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, it is in full spate; and from then on, Latin literature pullulates with rustic shepherds, flutes, nymphs and country retreats. When the classics were revived by Renaissance scholars (no strangers to urban anxiety themselves), the fantasy of the locus amoenus, the sylvan wilderness as "delightful place," moved to the forefront of the Western imagination. There it still reigns, vastly complicated and mutated by real necessity...
...wall had been fairly odious; its image was not Arcadia but Dante's dark wood, a labyrinth of fear and self-loss, full of bears, wolves and demons. The conditions of medieval labor did not, to put it mildly, foster belief in happy flute-playing rustics. The rediscovery of Vergil and Theocritus changed that. First in poetry and then in painting, the glimmering, closed Theocritean landscape where gods and shepherds pursue nymphs and shepherdesses amid the boskage was reconstructed. You know, looking at Dosso Dossi's The Three Ages of Man, about 1520-25, that its vision of harmonies between...
...17th century the classical world was the locus of ideal beauty, but how did a Frenchman enter it? A writer could read Vergil without leaving Paris, but a painter had to go to Rome. There, ancient sculpture and architecture abounded; from them, antiquity could be reimagined. It was the strength of the reimagining, not just its archaeological correctness, that counted. Poussin's main regular job during his Roman years was drawing records of ancient sculpture for a rich antiquary and scholar named Cassiano dal Pozzo. This gave him excellent access to collections, and the time to develop the repertoire...
Paradoxically, Eliot's failings are magnified by the enormous moral authority he acquired through his writing. He did not speak with the flamboyance of personality, that itch toward originality that distinguishes this blood-soaked century. Instead, he offered his words in the service of a long tradition, from Vergil to Dante to Donne to the Puritans among his ancestors. He saw himself, at times, as a modern Aeneas, compelled to struggle, suffer and carry old burdens to a new synthesis of civilization. He knew he was courting failure. He mocked his own earnestness in verse: "How unpleasant to meet...