Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry: Making Connections

Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Charles Sorley all died in the First Word War. They came from diverse social, educational, and cultural backgrounds, but for all of the writers, engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity was decisive in shaping their war poetry.

The world views and cultural hinterlands of Brooke and Sorley were framed by the Greek and Latin texts they had studied at school, whereas for Owen, who struggled with Latin, classical texts were a part of his aspirational literary imagination. Rosenberg’s education was limited but he encountered some Greek and Roman literature through translations, and through mediations in English literature.

The various ways in which the poets engaged with classical literature are analysed in the commentaries, which are designed to be accessible to classicists and to users from other subject areas. The extensive range of connections made by the poets and by subsequent readers is explained in the Introduction to the volume.

The commentaries illuminate relationships between the poems and attitudes to the war at the time, in the immediate post-war years, and subsequently. They also probe how individual poems reveal various facets of the poetry of unease, the poetry of survival, and the poetics of war and ecology.

Lorna Hardwick, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies, The Open University, Stephen Harrison, Professor of Latin Literature, University of Oxford, Elizabeth Vandiver, Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin and Classics, Emerita, Whitman College

Lorna Hardwick is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at the Open University and Honorary Research Associate at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Oxford. She is the Director of the Oxford University Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English 1990-2005 digital project and the joint Series Editor of the OUP series Classical Presences and Classical Interventions. She convenes the international research network Classics and Poetry Now (CAPN) and was a founding convener of the Classical Reception Studies Network (CRSN). Hardwick was the founding editor of the Classical Receptions journal and the Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies. She is a joint editor (with Stephen Harrison and Elizabeth Vandiver) of the OUP digital and print project Oxford Classical Reception Commentaries (OCRC).

Stephen Harrison has been a fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford since 1987 and was tutor in Latin from 1987 to 2020. He has been a visiting lecturer on six continents, makes regular visits to North America and Italy, and has worked for some years on collaborative Latin commentary projects in the Netherlands and Germany. He is an occasional visiting professor at the Universities of Copenhagen, Trondheim, and Stellenbosch and has been a visiting professor/fellow at Princeton IAS, Stanford, Bergen, La Sapienza (Rome), Tel Aviv, and the Universities of Canterbury and Otago. He is a joint editor (with Lorna Hardwick and Elizabeth Vandiver) of the OUP digital and print project Oxford Classical Reception Commentaries (OCRC).

Elizabeth Vandiver retired from Whitman College in 2019, where she taught from 2004. Before coming to Whitman, she held positions at Northwestern University, the University of Maryland, Loyola University (New Orleans), and Rhodes College (Memphis), among others. She taught for a year at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. She is a joint editor (with Lorna Hardwick and Stephen Harrison) of the OUP digital and print project Oxford Classical Reception Commentaries (OCRC).