The Aeneid

by Virgil

One aspect of Dante’s Virgil is not too distant from Tennyson’s “Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man"; this is the Virgil of “lo bello stile,” “the beautiful style,” in Canto I of the Inferno. But Dante was able to learn from Virgil not only the beautiful style, but the styles of Virgil. Virgil cannot compare with Dante in the range of his lexis, in the range of the real he comprehends. His words are fewer than Dante’s; and he and Dante belong to separate classes in the two types of poets distinguished by Donald Davie in Purity of Diction in English Verse: “One feels that Hopkins could have found a place for every word in the language if only he could have written enough poems. One feels the same about Shakespeare. But there are other poets, I find, with whom I feel the other thing—that a selection has been made and is continually being made, that words are thrusting at the poem and being fended off from it, that however many poems these poets wrote certain words would never be allowed into the poems, except as a disastrous oversight.”