This is in no sense a bibliography of Virgil. Apart from the lists given in general classical bibliographies (especially of course Marouzeau’s L’Année philologique) Virgil has been particularly well served recently by G. E. Duckworth’s two bibliographical surveys, and by R. G. Austin’s ‘Bibliography of Virgil’. My aim here is to try to give in modern terms a general survey of the nature and importance of Virgil’s poetry, based on a broad and selective consideration of recent important work of a critical kind. The reader must be warned that the literary judgements made are essentially subjective: the intention is not to give a tabulated list of views, but to endeavour to present a personal synthesis. Two important forthcoming books which I have not been able to include should be mentioned here: K. Quinn’s Virgil’s Aeneid; a Critical Description (Routledge); and the volume on Virgil in Dudley and Dorey’s series Studies in Latin Literature and Its Influence (Routledge).

The Eclogues may be studied in a number of different ways—as biographical material, as social and political documents, as poems. I am here concerned only with the last. In this first collection of Virgil’s poetry we already see some of the qualities which were to play their part in the Georgics and the Aeneid, and also some qualities which were not to reappear in these two more ambitious works. Essentially the Eclogues are set in a minor key; they do not aim at power or dramatic tension; their relationship with human experience is of a circumscribed kind; their method is mannered, largely conventional and traditional, often very imitative of Theocritus; they sing of beauty and sorrow and death, but in my view they do not generally explore these things. They are delicate and fragile poems, presented in a diction which charms and soothes, in a metre whose cadences have always captivated those with enough Latin to read them.

‘The best poem of the best poet’, said Dryden. And Spence (a generation or so later): ‘The most beautiful and most correct poem that ever was wrote in the Roman language.’ It is not hard to see why the Georgics had such a powerful appeal to the English Augustans, nor why the English Georgic became a poetic genre in its own right in the eighteenth century. The absolute control of the medium, the perfection of finish such as we do not find uniformly in the unrevised Aeneid, put it alongside Horace’s Odes as an example of artistic excellence of the highest degree. The elaborate diction, with its elevation of the ordinary and the common into ornate and cultivated paraphrase, naturally pleased those whose ears were attuned to listen for elegance, dignity, and propriety.

We know that Virgil, like Milton, spent many preliminary years in planning an epic poem, turning over the possibilities, practising his skill and techniques on other genres before undertaking the most ambitious of all the literary types. He tells us himself at the beginning of the sixth eclogue that when he wished to sing of kings and battles, Apollo warned him to keep to pastoral poetry; and in the proem to Geo. iii he promises to make a temple of song whose shrine shall be Caesar’s, and on the doors will be pictures of the conquering Romans and of their glorious ancestors.

He did not in the end sing of Alban kings, nor yet (directly) of the battles of Caesar: he selected instead a subject which offered wide scope within his chosen area of interest.