CHAPTER EIGHT

Modernism

I(ennetÍt Hnttnes

Introduction
One major current of European and North American modernism was a new atten-
don to archaic, preclassical, and primitive aspects of classical antiquity.l As a visual
icon, the archaic howroswas to the first half of the wentieth century what the
l-aocoón group was to the late Renaissanceand Baroque or the Elgin marbles to
the Romantic period. This orientation toward an ever-more-remote antiquity - from
Hellenistic sculpture to the marbles of classicalAthens to preclassicalGreek figures -
parallels a broad feature of the classical uadition in western Europe since the
Rcnaissance,where in successiveperiods the dominant focus of attention moved
tiom the Rome of seventeenth-century classicism to the Athens of nineteenth-
ccntury Hellenism to the preclassical Greece of the modernists.
The archaic art and üterature exploited by modernists encompassed much more
rhan the Mediterranean world. Primitive art of all sorts, stimulated especially by
.\liican and Pacific works but also by pre-Columbian figures, Paleolithic cave paint-
ing, and folk art, was a major influence on painters and sculptors for the 30 years or so
liom Picasso (with Les Deruoisellesd'Attignon, L907) to the artists of Die Brüche to
*urrealists and others (on modernist primitivism, see in general Rubin 1984; Barkan
¿nd Bush 1995; Cardinal 199ó; Flam 2003). This wide influence contrasts with
gr.ro'ious,more isolated instances of primitivism, such as Gauguin's. Often it is not
f¡o*sible to distinguish Mediterranean sources from other primitive influences. Bran-
cusi, for example, turned equally to Cycladic art, Romanian folk culture, and African
rx work. In this iningling of primitive sources the differences
"{frican-influenced
¿¡nong particular primitive societies were usually ignored, and a similar aesthetic
r¿nd sometimes mythology or spirituality) was found in or imposed on very diverse
üfoups; the basis for such similarity was most often no more than an opposition
ro ccrtain features of the modern age. This, too, has a precedent in earlier periods of
rhc classical reception. Romantic Hellenism, for example, merged with Romantic
t02 IQnneth HaYnes

addit
medievalism,althoughtheyhadnomoreincommonthantheirdistancefromthe asa(
In both cases,the scholarly corrections
nog,rrr"r, classicismórrrr. éigrrr"enrh century. in th
thatensuedtoplace-o,k,i,'fullerhistoricalandanthropologicalcontextswere Se
initial enthusiasm and attention'
themselves dependent and consequent on the
relig
IftheprimitivistcurrentwithinmodernismwasnotlimitedtoGreekandRoman
modernism limited to the archaic' J.E
works, neither was the classical tradition within soci<
PoetryrangingfromEzraPound's..HomagetoSextusPropertius',(I9I9)and in e
Ld prose such as-Hermann Broch's
Constantine Cavafy's poems of Alexandria,
Mewloirsof Had'rinn (1951)' are phet
lrin o¡Virgll (1945) and Marguerite Yourcenar's
be inspired by any period of classical ¡nef
obvious reminders that modernist writers could
maj(
antiquitY.
particular affinities. of a writer, but the I Fec
such inspiration was partly a matter of the tFraz
classicalworld meant in the early
nadonal contexr was drá irruotu.d. \\4rat the ancient
The
twentiethcenturyincountrieslikeGreatBritainandGerman¡withtheirStrong
and education, differed from *ouI
nineteenth-century traditions of Hellenic enthusiasms f,nvt
whatitmeantinthemoreLatin-basedcultureofltalyandFrance,andithadyet
like Greece and Russia' ryirj
another range of meanings for Orthodox countries
interest in the classicalworld' and some P'rin
FinallS a number of m'odernists had little
¡nd
wereactivelyhostiletoit;thefuturists,forexample,vehementlyespousedthemodern
deadening weight of uadition' unit
experience áf ,p.ed and iechnology over the F
classicalworld: the archaic first and
This chapter will be organ itrdóy period of the
Greek, and then by classical il¡s
at greatest length, ronow"e¿by classicaland postclassical
will be written works, and the l[r¡(
and postclassicalLatin. Mort áf th. e*"mpl.s discussed
literary criticism. Foreign tides will tibl
discussion will involve both literary history and
to secondary literature will mostly be $u(
usually be given in English, and ieferences
uni
restricted to works in English' *id
{rtx
2 The Archaic I
stl

of the archaic differ from previous thc

In what ways does the modernist discovery
l."tt the eighteenth century (Boas s¡r
episodes of primitivism, influential since ui
¡ül(
f^lZa¡ ana a major component of Romanticisml
the
First, sensatiorr"l discoveries from the I870s on transformed üf)l

"..li""ological ¡er
contemporaryunderstandingofantiquity.HeinrichSchliemannbelievedthathe
discovered the Homeric cit], of Troy in his
excavations in l87l-3, and despite q
greeted his discoveries' as
some scholarly skepticism a wide public enthusiastically
¡ñ
theydidlaterinthedecadewhenhepublishedhisfindingsatMycenae,Inthel880s
the cycladic civilization more ffi¡
British and German archaeologists began to investigate
Etienne and Etienne 1992 on the frt
thoroughly than ever before (á. "., overview, see
seeDoumas I99r)' Lastl¡ toward m1
archaeology of the cycladic civilization specificall¡
quarter of the twentieth, Arthur s!
the end of the ninetáenth century and ftr the first
oi what he called the "Minoan" dt
Evans excavated at Knossos in crete the remains
@r
c i v i l i z a t i o n . P r e v i o u s l s i t w a s e a s y t o b e l i e v e t h a t G r e e k a r t b e g a n w i t h t hIn
e
civilizations had been added to it'
,!&!
Parthenont now the urt of thr.. more ancient
 Modernisrn 103

addition, the status of Homer and Greek legendary stories was fundamentally altered,
as a concrete historical dimension was restored to what had been mere myth (Graver,
in this volume).
Second, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the interpretation of primitive
religion became a central preoccupation of anthropological theorists (J. G.Frazer,
I. E. Harrison, W. R. Smith, E. B. Tylor) in contrast to the more political and
sociologicalconcerns just after mid-century (Bachofen, Maine, Morgan). This shift
in emphasis (Kuper 1988) brought attention to the various and controversial
phenomena of animism, fetishism, ritual, sacrifice, and totemism. Anthropological
attempts to synthesize this material prepared the way for the uses of mythology in
major American and British modernists - Eliot, loyce, Lawrence, Pound, and Yeats
(Feder l97I; Manganaro 1994). Of all such attempts, The Gold.enBough by I. G.
Frazerhad perhaps the greatest literary impact (discussedat length by Vickery 1973).
The study, published in two volumes in 1890 and reaching 12 volumes by l9I5'
sought to identify a central pattern of ritual not only in classical antiquity but in
mythology everylvhere: the dying and resurrecting sacred king who embodies the
spirit of vegetation. The work was unsettling not only for treating classical and
primitive mlths on equal footing but also for its implicit connection of Christianity
and myth. Because of the work of Frazer and others, mlthology seemed to have
universal application.
Frazer held a fellowship at Cambridge, and pardy due to his example a group of
classicistslater known as the "Cambridge Ritualists" introduced the anthropological
study of religion into classicalscholarship (Ackermann l99l; Calder I99l; and for a
bibliograph¡ Arlen 1990); the career of )ane Harrison, in particular, has been closely
studied (Peacock1988; Beard 2000; Robinson 2002). They were influential not only
in insisting on the religious and ritualistic aspects of Greek culture but also' along
with Nietzsche and to some degree Pater, in drawing attention to the darker,
unenlightened, and chthonic phenomena of classicalantiquity.
In German-speaking countries) a similar combination of classicsand anthropology
in the nineteenth century would come to influence modernist writers. In particular,
rhe work of J. I.Bachofen, who began his career as a professor of Roman law but
gained fame for his speculations in the l8ó0s about an original matriarchal society
and about the Orphic mysteries,was much read in the I920s and 1930s, influencing
not only writers such as Hauptmann, llofmannsthal, Mann, Rilke, and others but
also the political debates of the time and even the development of psychoanalytic
theory (Davies 2005; Gossman 2000: lIt-200; and Ryan 1999:167)'
-
Third, some of the most influential thinkers of the modern period Freud, Marx,
and Nietzsche - had a familiarity with classical antiquity that left a fundamental
imprint on their analysesof the conditions of modern life (on Freud and antiquiry
see Armstrong 2005; Barker 199ó; and Gamwell and Wells 1989; on Marx and
antiquity, see the bibliography by McCarthy 1999). Nietzsche is the most obvious
case,since he began his career as one of the most promising classicalscholars of his
day,later aband.oning the profession of classicsto assumethe mande of the prophet of
modernity. In his first book, The Birth of Traged.y(1872), he wrote, "And now the
I mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by all past ages,and digs and grubs
I04 IGnnethHaynes

The
for roots, even if he has to dig for them among the remotest antiquities" ($23, trans.
Walter IGufmann). In the last third of the book he celebrates the rebirth of German {Odyss
m1'th in Wagner, but already by the time of his next work, the aphoristic Hwrwnn, All- of his st
history
too-Hwrnan (1878), he changes tack and instead of attempting to recuperate myth,
embraces the possibilities opened up by the end of myth. His attitude would change renewa
again in subsequent works. Still, however it is interpreted, the exhaustion of myth as a are rep
condition of modern life is a constant theme in Nietzsche's writings, one that Pisnn (
anticipates and exposes the modernist self-entanglement with the archaic, celebra
The imaginative forms of social solidarity that were evident in archaic societies sustain,
provided a ground against which to diagnose the pathologies of modern life and to The
understand the radical pressures exerted on the social structures of the day by civiliza
industrialization, positivism, Darwin, and the erosion of traditional belief. Even rcligior
without classical training, other thinkers, notably French sociologists such as cnds w
Durkheim, Iévy-Bruhl, and Mauss, had a wide influence on writers who were rcferen
n'hen t
attempting to come to grips with the strained relations of past and present. The
sense of süain became a sense of crisis with the world wars and the economic uPwaf(
"'let th,
disruptions ofworld depression, and the relation of modern culture to its past became
a question of great urgency. Under these conditions, T. S. Eliot, in his essay"Trad- concer.
ition and the Individual Talent" (1919), gave a new emphasisto the word "trad- powerl
ition," one in keeping with his own sense of the necessity of cultural and ritual tha¡r ar
survivals in modern life (in The Waste Larud.he is as skeptical as he is desirous of The
those survivals). Ezra Pound, although he did not have Eliot's sense of tradition, the cas
shared his urgency about the past) attempting to reclaim what he saw as the essential tone o
texts and jettisoning others. The modernist attitude towards classics,generally speak- cach el
ing, was one of urgencS of rescue rather than reappraisal. cxamp.
The most sustained literary engagement with the archaic may be Pound's Cnntos, a [ropo.
"'fhe l
long work begun around I9l5 and abandoned in the l9ó0s. It opens with a version
of the "Nekuia," Book 11 of the Od.yssey, in which Odysseusvisits Hades. Pound ncrv lif
believedthat it represented the oldest stratum of the Poem, and, in common with the ,:f. 8.7
anrhropological turn of some of the classicalscholarship of his da¡ he emphasized the tcchnir
ritualist and mythic dimension of the descent to the underworld (Pound l97I:274; dcscrip
relevant passagesby Jane Harrison are quoted in Bush 1976: L26-8). Yet Pound does túay'
not translatefrom Greek; instead, he usesAndreas Divus' Latin translation of 1538' ['ound
Moreover, he includes some archaic English words: "fosse" for ditch; "dreory," a Hol
coinage meant to restore the etymological senseof "dreary" (dripping with blood); i$ diffi
Home
"bever" for drink; "pitkin", a coinage based on an obsolete diminutive, and others.
The archaic vocabulary here is deployed only intermittendy; he avoids the monotony thc qu
of the more consistently archaizing diction of Morris, Rossetti, or Doughty, for brothe
example, reserving it for special effects. (Later, inthe Pisan Cantos andthe Confucian lbnny,
Od.es.Pound shows himself the twentieth-century master of archaic diction.) The Axtho.
rhythm of the translation is largely blank-verse, but some lines are deliberately b1'But
modeled on the rhlthm of The Seafarer,with alliterative words in stressedpositions. rhat Jr
Canto I is meant to be triply archaic: the most ancient part of an ancient poem is hngua
uanslated from a Latin version of the Renaissance(which also served as the basis for kl'c..
Chapman's Homer) into an English that recallsAnglo-Saxon. rnchae
 Modernisrn 105

The outward-directed artists and men of action whom Pound celebrates

(Odysseus, Sigismundo Malatesta, Mussolini, and many others) constitute only part
of his study. Pound seeksto identify primeval experiencesthat recur in histor¡ to read
history as mlth. The descent into the world of the dead is necessaryfor rebirth and
renewal, a return to the roots that sustain life. The experiencesof ritual and initiation
afe represented on several occasions, in Cantos XVII and XL\tII, as well as in the
Pisnn Cnntos. Over the course of the latter, the sacred marriage of Demeter and Zeus
celebrated at Eleusis is recreated elliptically,2 initially in fragments, with a more
sustained affirmation toward the end of the sequence.
The Cantos grappleswith what Pound believes to be the religious underpinning of
civilization, where by "civilization" is meant the life, the political, economic,
religious, and artistic life, in the great cities at or just before their prime. Canto I
ends with fragments from the Homeric hymns to Aphrodite, in Latin and English; its
reference to "Aphrodite, Cypri monumenta sortita est" becomes clear only later,
rvhen the vision is more fully articulated ín the Pisan Cantos ("the hidden city moves
upward" in Canto LXXXIII, and a series of puns in Canto LXXKI culminates wiü
"let the herbs rise in April abundant"; seeCarne-Ross1985: 37-8). Pound is equally
concerned to denounce the enemies of this organic vision; the denunciations take
powerful poetic form in the "usura" Cantos (XLVand LI) but elsewhere are no more
than anti-Semitic raüngs against Jewish financiers.
The relation of the Od.yssey to Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is more controversial than in
rhe caseof Pound's Cantos. On a few occasions loyce supplied a schema of the work
(one of these was published in Stuart Gilbert's JarnesJoyce\ Ulyssu, 1930), in which
each episode is given a title that recalls an episode from Homer. The Nekuia, for
example, corresponds to chapter 6 of Ulysses, called "Hades" in the schema, in which
lropold Bloom attends the funeral for Paddy Dingham. Bloom's thoughts wander:
"The Botanic Gardens are just over there. It's the blood sinking in the earü gives
new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy" (Joyce 1986: 6.771;
cf. 8.729). Ronald Bush, in a discussion of Pound's Canto I) contrasts Pound's
technique with ]oyce's, noting that Joyce employs the Flaubertian technique of
description mainly to represent how "the experience of death and renewal feels
tod.ay for un ltom.ynelnlyen sensaal" (Btsh ).976: I30-l) - in sharp contfast to
Pound's attempt at a direct evocation of archaic ritual.
Flowever, to describe in more general terms the relation between l{omer and Joyce
is difficult. Not only do the different chapters have gready varying relationships to
Homer and to myth, but critics are divided about how to interpret them. In answer to
rhe question about which books on the Ulysses fheme were studied by Ioyce, his
brother Stanislaus answered, "Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare,Racine, Fénelon,
-lennyson,
, Phillips, d'Annunzio, and Hauptmann, as well as Samuel Btffet's The
Aatboress of the Odysseyand Bérard Les Phéniciens et I'Od.yssée,and the translations
b!, Butler and Cowper" (Stanford 1964:276n6).' The translations are significant in
that Joyce, for all his enthusiasm for Greek, did not read or pretend to read the
language. Hugh Kenner emphasized in two respectsthe impact of Buder's FIomer on
- -
loyce. First, Butler was "the first creative mind Joyce's was the second to take the
archaeologist's FIomer seriously" (Kenner 1969: 293). The archaeological context
l0ó IGnnetb Haynes

of ordinary life were restored to Rai

was one in which the concrete and everyday details
as sublimely removed from the E
prominence in a poem that most victorians had treated ..texture of a
plain prose had t-he sonn(
the quotidian. Second, Butler,s translation into the l
naturalistic novel, the ,"-. ,.",ore a reader of ]oyce encounters" (Kenner I9ó9:
fully explored by Michael seidel Hern
2g6). Theinfluence of Bérard's study on )oyce was (19t:
(1g76).The Homeric names of the episodes of
(Jlyssesare the same as the chapters in
Odysseus is carefully translated accor
Bérard's stud¡ and the geography that he offered for ities
a Phoenician, that is,
into the geography oi ooblirr. Moreover, he emphasizes coml
had an "archaeological"
Semitic, background to odysseus'wanderings, and so ]oyce it (R
in the role of a modern Odysseus'
precedent foicasting the Jew Bloom Ebgl
are multifarious' cunningly made, and
The links berween utysrn and the od.ysey ninel
In an essayof 1923,
endlessly elaborated. But how should they be understood? mytl
Eliotmadeacaseformyth,arguingthatJoyce'scontinuousparallelbetween large
of ordering' of giving a
contemporaneity and antiquity is "a way of controlling' Klee
and anarchy which is
,hup. a significance to the immense panorama of futility
"rrd ls5
contemporaryhistory"(Eliot1975:177)'Yetitremainsanopenquestionwhat T]
kind of order, if i, yielded by the intricate systemization. other readings
",'y, rrit
emphasize the paroJic of the novel: the middling perceptions of
"i.*.,,,, the Hom¡ri¡ framework itself loso
Bloom, the inflated "epic" language of chapter 12,
Revival (argued by Platt ¡he
as pseudoclassicalin trr. *"y r"uot.¿ by the Irish Literary
self-deceptions of Stephen ¡ccc
f qis: qg-rZ 7), and.mosr centrally the illusions and
myth nor a parody of myth, :cek
Dedalus. It may be that the novel offers neither
the difference between them' ¡se
neither order nor a parody of order, but unsettles that
For Guy l)avenporr, ioy..;, labyrinthine symbolism is "a mimesis of symbolism: a
man's ideas, his art, his noblest Gre
dramatic perception, ,rlti-"t.ly tragic, that
are forgeries of meaning" kcr
configurations of sense, are no more than symbols. They
traf
(Davenport1987:60).
he was both phil
llomer -", -n¡o, presenceamong the Greek modernists, for whom
" legacy available, in thc
an import of western European Hellenism and a domestic sor
ho*.u.rquestionableadegre",intheGreeklanguage'landscape'andfolkexperi-
with Homer, icono- lo{
ence. Nikos Kazantzakis', ó¿yory(193S) is in open competition
extreme" (Ricks 1989: 3) against ¡c{:1
clastically pitting "demoticism at its lexical phi
of Ithaca by inventing a
Homer,s pteti. language and canceling the stable appeal rte
The title of George seferis's
seriesof amoral wanderi"ngsafter odysseus' return home.
but also insists on "myth- ü¡n
Mythistorernn(1935) has its ordinary meaning, "novel," I
both its ordinary and tragic
history,,; in Seferis generall¡ ,...ni Greek history in {rri
world' In Mythistorernn, the
dimensions, coexists with a mythology from the ancient *ü
in
looser than ]oyce's ulyssesbutperhaps more intense:
connections to the od,ysseyare
in the final poem of the sequence, dü
David Ricks has calledthe rewriting of the Nekuia
the living and the dead, t-o
so that it affirms the poet's uo."iion as agenr between
,.perhaps seferis, most distinctive contribution to European poetry" (Ricks 1989: ry
most concerned with the {llt
137; seealso Beaton I99I: 108-9). Angelos sikelianoswas
world, as in poems dt
mytiological and cosmological implicarions of Homer's
,,Homer.,, .'Achelous," and "Sécret Iliad," but more generally with a poetic bÉ
like
of priest' &ü
recreation of ancient myth in which the poet acts as a kind
 Mod.ernisrn r07

Rainer Maria Rilke's fascination with the archaic included texts like Gilgnrnesh and
the Egyptian Book of the Dead.as well as the Greek kowros,4which he celebrated in the
sonnet "Archaic Torso ofApollo" (1908). A fifth-century funeral relief that he saw in
the Museo Nazionale in Naples in 1904 inspired his poem "Orpheus. Eurydice.
Hermes" of the same year; it is also recalled at the end of the second Duino Elegy
(1912). The figure of Orpheus fascinated Rilke. He was attracted to Bachofen's
account of Orphism, and after his trip to Egypt he became interested in the similar-
ides of Orphic mysteries with ancient Egyptian death cults. Such an attempt at
comparative mythology was a common exercise of the time, and he read widely in
ir (Ryan 1999: 176-7), attempting his own synthesisof myth in the tenth Duino
Elegy and many of the Sonnets to Orpbews(1922). Symbolists at the end of the
nineteenth century often invoked Orpheus as the figure for the poet, and his
m¡hology was further developed in the first half of the twentieth century by a
large number of writers, artists, and musicians:Apollinaire, Benn, Cocteau, Dufy,
Klee, Redon, Stravinsky,Tsvetayeva,and many others (Strauss l97l; Segal 1989:
155-98; and Brunel 1999).
The archaic becomes important at this time in another respect: the fragmentary
rvrirings of the pre-Socratic philosophers are evaluated anew, above all in the phi-
losophy of Martin Heidegger after the publication of Being and Tirne (1927). Erom
the I930s onward, Heidegger abandons his preüous attempt to give an a priori
account of how Being becomes intelligible within human experience and instead
seeksto give a history of Being. This history consistsof distinct epochsthat constitute
a series of "falls," marked by increasing Seinntergessenheit (the forgetting of Being)
rhat culminates in the nihilism of modernity. One critical event was the uanslation of
Cireekphilosophical terms into Latin ones. In Introd.wctiln t0 Meta'physlcs(given as a
lccture course in 1935 and first published in 1953), Heidegger writes that all the
rra¡rslations of Greek philosophical language into Latin destroyed "the authentic
philosophical naming force of the Greek": this translation was "the first stage in
rhe isolation and alienation of tlle originary essenceof Greek philosophy," which
n'ould become definitive for the Middle Ages and modern philosophy (Heidegger
2000: I4). In other writings, such as "Plato's Doctrine of Truth," given as class
lccrures ín I93I-2 and published about a decade later, Heidegger emphasizes the
philosophy of Plato - notably the allegory of the cave - as the decisive rupture that
u'ould impoverish philosophy by reducing truth to no more than the agreement of
language with reality.s
Wherever the fall is identified, for Heidegger the history of Being has its numinous
origin in pre-Socratic Greece. Critical for Heidegger was the Greek word alEtheia,
n'hich he understood, through a debated etymolog¡ as "unconcealment" or "dis-
closure" (on the history of Heidegger's understanding of truth in this sense, see
1<rung2002:5-6). The usual translation of the word as "truth," understood as the
¡s.reementor correspondenceof propositions to facts, is inadequate since it depends
r:n rhe existence of things in the first place, and facts about them, and propositions
rhat refer to them. Truth understood as correspondence depends on t-here already
hci.ng present a world, a disclosed horizon; it is, therefore, derivative of a
rnore primordial truth. This more primordial truth was experienced above all in
I0B lGnneth HaYnes

to cmbodie
pre-SocraticGreece,uniquely open to the self-presencingof Being' in contrast rgvenge
reliably present (Young
th" ,obr.q,.ent reduction of Being to ontology, to objects Antigon
philo-
1997: Il)). Heidegger repeatediyturns to the fragments of pre-socratic ¡bsurd r
sophers,in iect rres, inhis litrod.ucti,n t0 Metaphysia,and in essays on Anaximander,
English in Heidegger C)n mytt
Heraclitus, and Parmenides (collected and translated into
1945; ar
I9B4; for Anaximander,seealso Heidegger 2002:242-8L)'
*üat is ¿
1984: I
r 1934),
3 Classical and Postclassical Greek incident
uagedy urote tl
The long involvement of American and European dramatists with Greek
many plays. The emphases [ibretto
througháut the first half of the wentieth century yielded
dramatic ünce stz
varied, from mlth to psychology to politics, as did their dramaturgy and
Eliot, Giraudoux, brurgic;
lurrgoág., but ihe plays-on Greek themes by Anouilh, Cocteau,.
rioncth(
H"iptÁ*n, Ilofmannsthal, Jeffers, and O'Neill have had at best only a mixed
these responses Frogles
,.."faio.r. In conjunction with other arts, especially music, a few of
*e also
to Greek uagedy have been more enduring' Gide
lyrics and
At the b.gI.rni.rg of the twentieth century, Hofmannsthal abandoned the
essay "htter of l,ord üreek t
short verse ptays that had made his reputation; in his short
skepticism about the Tk Fat
Chandos,, (W,OZ¡, the fictional author expresses a radical
his literary activity' *idcs u
possibilities of language in order to explain his decision to cease
{f}fitem
(Electra, 1904;
Srrortty afterwards, he begatr to write plays on classical themes
myth' ritual, and fkctra
oed.ipusand. tbe sphinx,1906; and Iúng oed.ipws,1907)in which
these, thc Cir
gesture were to create a new language. Electrn, the first and most famous of
turned The lis
announced on its title page that it was "freely after Sophocles." l{ofmannsthal
extremity. The transformation was dupirit
Sophocles, play into i study of psychological
of decadent sexuality that The
motilrat"d by the example of wilde's snlome, a drama
women; cnoderr
Hofmannsthal saw in 1903; by reading Freud and Breuer on hysteria in
the Furies were interpreted $r,mbo
and by a study of Rohde's Psyche(1898), a work in which ,Xransk
I51).
psychologicallyas an exrreme manifestationof a diseasedmind (Goldhill2002: ''
when Strauss f:xas
Ho*.rr.r. fame is attached not to the play but to the revised form it took
original, $rüct. r
adopted it for his opera. The libretto is about two-thirds the length of the
simplify the psychologies $r Pet
str*r, having made cuts to streamline the play and to
moods ülr me
explored by Hofmannsthal (Gilliam I99r: 3ó). The music with its contrasting
largest part of the opera)' expressive sffson
(four confrontations with Electra constitute the
dissonance, thematic unity, and extensive network of motifs realizes Hofmannsthal's
¡ne
ambitions more fully than his own words alone (Gilliam I99I: I-L7 and 67-L06;
of 'TlIT
Murray I9g2). Even more drasticall¡ 40 years later, the staging and language
f¡¡Cr,
context
Gerhait Hauptmann's Atreid.es Tetralogy,his rewriting of the Oresteia in the hun
German¡ were not equal to his dramatic ambitions,
of the last yiars of Hitler's
(Maurer @
although thl darkly fatalistic atmosphere of the tetralogy has been admired
1982:123-30).
In Girau- This ¿
French rewritings of Greek tragedy were often concerned with politics'
to the murder of 197.3:
doux,s Electra (1937), Aegisthus is not only the accomplice
to his city. He rfuhin
Agamemnon, but also a successfulruler who has brought prosperity
 Mod.ernisrn r09

cmbodies and explicitly defends the political expediency against which Electra's
revenge seems poindessly destructive. The same conflict is heightened in Anouilh's
Antigone (1944), where Antigone's defiance of Creon may be no more than an
absurd rebellion against bourgeois values. Antigone is probably the best of the plays
on mythological themes he wrote at this time (including Ewryd'ice, I94I; Orettes,
1945; and Med.earl946): its "stagecraft" and "argumentative cunning . . . far exceed
s.hat is a fundamentally tawdry, reductive treatment of the Antigone theme" (Steiner
1984: f93). Besides his rewriting of the story of Oedipus in Tl'teInfernnl Mnchine
11934), Cocteau produced a colloquial French version of Antigone in 1922, with
incidental music by Honegger and scenerydesigned by Picasso.A few years later he
\r-rote the French text that was translated into Latin (by ]ean Daniélou) to serve as the
libretto for Stravinsky's "opera-oratorio" Oed.ipasRex (1927-8). The Latin feels at
once stately ("Divum Jocastaecaput mortuum!", llead of Jocasta,divine, dead) and
lirurgical, and the opera, designed to have a static and "neoclassical" monumentality,
nonerheless recreates the movement of Oedipus' fate, musically translated into the
progress from "florid melisma into stony syllabic simplicity" (Taruskin 1992: 577;
seealso Walsh 1993).
Gide (Oedipws, l93I) and Sartre (Tlte Flia, ).943) also based plays on ancient
Greek tragedy, as did D'Annunzio (The Dead' City, f 898). T. S. Eliot took the plots of
Tbe Fnm,ily Rewnion (1939) and The Cochtail Pnrty (1949) from Aeschylus' Ewnce-
nides and Euripides' Alcestis, respectively, and rewrote them in the language of the
contemporary drama of social manners. Eugene O'Neill's trilogy Moarning Becornes
Electra (1931) rransplants the Oresteia to a New England setting immediately after
rhe Civil War. Robinson Jeffers adapted and imitated a number of Greek tragedies.
The list of such adaptations in the first half of the twentieth century is long and
dispiriting.
The Hellenism of Osip Mandelstam, in contrast, is one of the great achievementsof
modernist literature. Though he was not as erudite in classical philology as the
$t.mbolist poets Innokenty Annensky (who translated Euripides), Vyacheslav fvanov
Irranslator of Sappho and Aeschylus), or Valery Br¡rsov, he absorbed and in some
'(corrected" (Mandelstam 1979 477) their influence to become the greater
c¿ses
F$€t. fu a student at the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of
St. Petersburg, he loved Greek in a personal, passionate,and idiosyncratic way (see
rhe memoir by his Greek tutor quoted in Brown 1973:47). His Hellenism is ükewise
pcnonal. He contrasts Hellenization with an "inner" or "domestic" Flellenism:

an earthenwarepot, oven tongs, a milk jug, kitchen utensils,dishes;it is anythingwhich

surroundsthe body. Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth experiencedas something
sacred . . . the transformation of impersonalobjects into domestic utensils,and the
humanizingand the warming of the surroundingworld with the most delicateteleo-
logicalwarmth. (Mandelstam1979: 127-8)

This amalgam of "loftiness and distance with the familiar homeliness" (Brown
1973: 255) is not contrasted with Rome or Cfuistianity but encompasses them
nithin his commitment to the Mediterranean world and European high culture; it
It0 KennethHnynes

*lf Bvzant
exists in an intimate relation to the "ludaic chaos" (Mandelstam 1986: 83-8) that
sf the cit
drives him to embrace it. *rcügiout
Stone(1913| Mandelstam's first book of verse, includes severalpoems on classical
il¡uallels a
themes; two poems (Nos. ó2 and 78) invoke Homer in a mood of languid, golden hrtak frol
slowness. Tristia (L922) is more haunted by death. The figure of Persephone appeÍüs ,\loder:
throughout the book, knit to the darkened fate of St. Petersburg and of the living, ar¡nslatio
fleshly word after the Revolution. In this book and in his subsequent poetry, classical du¿cn tr¿
references are deployed indirectly and suggestivel¡ with complex effect (Bryusov ,ü$ndnue(
even complained about the inaccuracies of the mythology; see Brown 1973: 266). ü928 he I
The title poem "Tristia" invokes Ovid,6 other ancient writers, and Pushkin in its
{"*ll¿cted
study of leauetakittg. Although lament and nostalgia are dominant moods in the cfNrrus fi,
joyful
book, they are counterpointed by moments of quiet contentment and of the
wIbeW
recognition of one's condition in time that is made possible by high literary' Poerns
furncns\
(1928) collects the previous books and adds a few new poems' including the great
ünrn Eu:
anguished ode "The Horseshoe Finder," which Mandelstam offers as the defeated
nr¡nslatec
ená of the trad.ition of the ode inaugurated by Pindar (on this theme, see Cavanaugh rrlccdon
1995: Ió3-B). In the final poems of the VoronezhNoteboohs, referencesto the classical
urr4¡cdian
Mediterranean world are placed under the extreme pressure of Stalin's terror; Rome
is depicted in a sinister light.
Constantine Cavafy wrote a few early poems on Homeric themes' avoided almost
totally rhe Greece of the fifth century, and set the majority of his classicallyinspired
poems in the Hellenistic empire or later. Marguerite Yourcenar, who translated a ü , el 9 l 7
selection of his poetry into French prose, divided the latter into cycles: mrxi" (:
cycle, which we might also ca-ll rhe Fall of the Hellenistic Mon- $..J.I3);
the PtolernyrSelewcid.s
archies-Triumphof Rome,the largest,sinceit includesat leastrwo dozen poemsand the &q Grea
ones most chargedwith pathos and irony; ttre four étudesde lnneursin the Hellenized nsrtcd as
cycle; ten {&(¿ns tc
Jews cycle;sevenpoems in the fine Alexandrian Caesar-Caesarion-Antony
poemsín the Sophists-Poets-Ancient (Jniversities
cycle,which constitutes the equivalent srr¡lvcm
of Cavafy'sñ.rsp¡oticñ,;two poems on Nero . . . ; some twenfy poems in the Pagan' i'S]51 or
Christianscycle ...; two poemsaboutApolloniusof Tyana;sevenPoemson, or rather fuwpcrtir
against, ]ulian the Apostate; seven in the Orthodoxy-ByzantineChronicles ,Winite ¿
cycle.(Yourcenar1985: L66-7) *trX,n€ Cel
fu:rrnan l
ClassicalGreek poetry plays only a small part in his own verse; he draws on the lesser-
*mpires
known Greek prose writers and evidently on works like E. R Bevan's l{ouse of
rmr,3\tr1
Selewcus (1902; see Yourcenar 1985: 1ó3) in creating his new myth of Alexandria'
wniidon
This city - historical, erotic, myhical - and the dispersed and disempowered inhab-
ü{mrr¡n'
itants of its empire yield the charactersand events over which his skeptical intelligence n&nütrens
ranges with oblique ironies and sympathies (see further Keeley 1976)'
*,r ifeat,
Becauseof "sailing to Byzantium" (1928) and "Byzantium" (1933), Yeats is *turr¡ler
the modernist most closely associated with Byzantium. In the nineteenth century,
cg.ri€s th
something like a "Byzantine revival" had occurred in the wake of the Gothic revival, ¿T A
MfE
with a particular appeal ro the international Arts and Crafts movement (see Bullen ,um clict
2003). Yeatsread W. G. Holmes's The 'Lge of Justinian and Theod.ora(1905) and a
w*,ntitior
few other works on the topic (Gordon I9ó2: 8J.-9), but the symbol he made
 Mod.ernisrn IlI

of Byzantium depends largely on the nineteenth century's aesthetic and organic view
ot the city. In A Vision (L925), he wrote that perhaps in early Byzantium alone
"religious, aesthetic and practical life were one." He was conscious of historical
il
n parallelsand connections between Ireland and Byzantium and perhaps saw Ireland's
:s break from England as an echo of Byzantium's break from Rome (Foster 2003:326).
Modernist poets did not translate extensively from Greek. Yeats adapted Jebb's
>,

il ranslation of Oed.ipwsRexin 1912, and wo decades later, after consulting "half a

rv ,lozen translations," he produced a version for the Abbey in December L926; he
continued to revise, closely studying Paul Masqueray's French Uanslation, and in
).
:S
1928 he published SophoclelIQng Oedipws(Clark and McGuire l9B9: 3-40). In his
.e Collected Plays of 1934 he added Sophocles' Oed'ipus a't Clllnus. He included a
il chorus from Oed.ipusat Colonusín The Tower(1928), and one "From the Antigone"
'ts in The Wind.ing Stair nnd. Other Poerns(1933). Other translators include not only
It Annensky and Ivanov but also H. D., whose imagistic translations include choruses
d tiom Euripides' Ipbigenia at Awlis in 1916 and from Hippolytws in l9l9 (she
h rranslated Euripides' Ion ín 1937), and Salvatore Quasimodo, who translated a
ú xlection of ancient Greek lyric in 1940 and subsequently turned to l{omer and the
€ ragedians (he also translated Latin verse).

it
d
4 Classical and Postclassical Latin
a
ln l9I7 Wilfred Owen denounced the "old Lie : Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria
mori" (a sweet and seemly thing it is, to die for one's country, Horace Odts
.3.2.J.3);the slaughter of a generation of the educated classin the trenches during
rhe Great War cast into radical doubt the value of the classical literature that had
srrved as the basis for their education. Pound found within Latin literature itself a
meansto attack the bloated poetic and political inheritance of his age (on Pound's
¡nvolvement with the poetfy of classical Rome during World War I, see Davidson
1995; on Pound and Vergil, see Davie 198ó). The goal of his Hornage to Sextws
Propertiwswasto present "certain emotions as vital to me in I9IT,faced with the
inhnite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire, as they were to Propertius
sa¡mecenruries earlier, when faced with the infinite and inefñble imbecility of the
Roman Empire,, (Pound l97I 23I). The analogy berween the British and Roman
,f f.npires - and between what Pound understood as Propertius' relation to l{orace
t.
end Vergil on the one hand and the modernist relation to the English poetic
¡r¡tlition on the other - provided the ground for rethinking and relaunching the
iirerary mode of imitation. The poem consists of Uanslations, adaptations, and
mistranslations of passagesfrom Propertius' later elegies, designed in various ways
s ro create an atmosphere of life confined within a deathly stasis (the deliberate
"'horvlers," for example, mock the deadening pedantry of scholars). The llomage
/,
t, lr¡ces rhe dramatic situation of a Propertius who struggles to find words for life and
1 k¡.e at a time when the available language comprises the deceptions of public life,
a rhc clichés and self-deceptions of romantic attachment, and a discredited poetic
rr¿dition (Sullivan I9ó4; Bush 1983).
r12 IQnneth HnYnes

began to be read in a new and *Tomlint

After World war I and with the rise of fascism,vergil
1936 to 1945, a period that sat' the corn
more darkly political way (Ziolkowski 1993). From r
the united States, Hermann ress).
his detention in Nazi .rrstody aswell as his emigration to
recreating the last 18 hours Reeves
Broch worked on The Deati of Vi,gil, alongprose fiction illustratir
of Vergil,s life. Broch had only .odi-.,'t",y Latin, and before this project he had
impetus for the book came from short pe
shown little interest in vergil or Rome . The initial
(1931)' a. study that drew For Pica
reading Theodor HaeckeÁ Virgit, Fnther of tbe West
sryles.Il
parallJs between Vergil's *á contempo-rary Europe and, co^1ti¡ruing a uadition
"g" (a spirit Christian by nature), that line
of reading Vergil as ^n noí*n naturnlitei Chriaiann
(Haecker's work also had a significant 543).H
emphasized the presence of love in his works
other ul
influenceonT.S'Eliot;seeReeveslg8g:9ó-1Ió).withfurtherdetailsfrom
Broch examines vergil's Other
Donatus, life of vergil, which a friend translated for him'
no dury can be imposed on it Scnecar
intention to destroy the Aeneid,.fut is autonomous) and
art necessarilywithdraws 1 9 2 5 )c
(Broch f983: 33a); rherefore, the artist's devotion to his
even from "the round of human action and the imperial
him from the domains of politics and
As history changes' this withdrawal may novelst
human need for help,, (Broch 1983: 225).
Augustus and Vergil argue, with optimis:
ceaseto be justified.1r, ih" ,hi.d section of the book,
last relents' and although lwitten
increasing Ágrr,about Vergil's intended sacrifice.Vergil at
is able to commit an act of depicter
this is not explained, it is clár "by renouncing his wish, he
love and spirit which is culture¡
human love, thus anticipating in his own way the kingdom of
nar in l
to come" (Ziolkowski f993: 205)'
that are commonly Your
From 1938 to 1944, Miklós Radnóti wrote eight eclogues'
Hungarian poetry' The initial classica
considered one of the great achievements of modern
Eclogwe 9 in 1938' He was sometil
impetus for these was a commission to translatevergil's
exile, and the poet's task, seemsI
attracted not only to the Vergilian themes of dispossession,
hexameters (all but two of
but also to formal aspectsof classicism,such as writing in
and thematic concerns
his eclogues are wriiten in dactylic hexameter). The formal
in a Iabor camp
form a.-ity. ln the seventh eclogue, written during his imprisonment
in Yugoslavia, he asks:

Every
- O home,O canit srill bef
scholal
withtlrebombing|Andlsitasthenwhentheymarchedusaway?
on Jan
And shallthosewho moan on my left and my right returnf
Sa¡ is there a country wheresomeonestill knows the hexameterl relatio:
(Ozsváth2000: 205) classic¿
of the
by the labor camps stumb
The hexamerer is a synecdoche for civilized life, which was ended
metrical commitment to ficr cri
and continued to exist only in memory and in the formal,
433)' The eighü rvorks
vergil and to the Hungarian hexameter uadition (George I9Bó:
march, combines the usefi¡l
..lJ!,r., written a few Lonths before his murder in a forced
prophet Nahum and Ziolk<
classicaland the biblical pastoral modes, and fury sustainsboth the
1999; Adams 1965)' (2005
the poet who bears*itn"ss to the torched cites of Europe (Géfin
but often indirect, inseparablefrom the invest
The mod.ernist reception of ovid was broad
2005); from this perspectivea critic the rr
encounter with mlth ifo, u ,*u"y see Ziolkowski
of literary modernism" Ulysst
mav have been iustifii in claiming oúd as a "chief ancestor
 Mod.ernisrn II3

t tTomlinson 2003: l0I). For Pound, Ovid's Metaworphosetwas "a sacredbook; one of
V rhe cornerstonesof his creating imagination" (Daüdson 1995: 116; see also Feder
1 1985). Eliot's WnsteLnnd. responds as much to Oüd as to Vergil (seeMedcalf 1988;
S Reeves 1989: 28-58; Martindale 1995-6; Tomlinson 2003: I2l4l). Picasso's
t illustrations of the Metwruur\hlseswere an unusually close response to the text' In a
I short period, he produced 30 etchings to a selection of m¡hs made by Albert Skira'
V For Picasso,the linear style of the illustrations was a means to unite modern and ancient
1 sg,les.He admi¡ed ancienr art, especiallyfifth-century vasepainting, and as he believed
'l diat line drawing alone was intrinsically abstract, it was also modern (Cowling 2002:
t
543). He made full use of the nonrepresentational "overlappings, foreshortenings, and
1 other uncertainties" (Florman 2000: 34) of the illustrations.
S Other Latin writers had a narrowei impact, significant in more isolated cases,as wit}l
t Senecaand T. S. Eliot, or with Petronius and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tbe Grent Gatsfo,
s 1925) or Cocteau (The Scboolof Wid'ows,I93ó). One of the fi'rllest engagementswith
e imperial Rome was Marguerite Yourcena¡'s Mewoirs of Had'rinn (1951)' an historical
v novel she began in Ig24,abandoned) and took up againin 1948, in a period of relative
I optimism, after war had ended and the United Nations was founded. The novel is
:l rwitten in the form of a monologue and a political testament) in which Hadrian is
,f depicted as a wise sensualisrand citizen whose flexibility, openmindednesstoward other Í
S .,-,lt rr.r, and large scope of thoughtful action ensured a limited peaceuntil drawn into
n,arin Palestine(seeYourcenar I980: I I3-29).
ixt
yourcenar was unusual in the degree to which she was immersed in classicsand
v
, l
LI classicallanguages.The lack of direct accessto classicswas more common) and it
sometimes - as with the exemplary instancesof Broch, Joyce, and Mandelstam
- $
S

') seemsto have acted as a positive incitement to engage classicaltexts in new ways'
t,
,f
S

Y
FURTHER READING

Every important modernist figure has been the subject of more criticism and
schoiarshipthan can be surveyed. Of the thousands of scholarly and critical works
on Jamesloyce, for example, there are hundreds devoted to various aspectsof his
relation to classics.Yet for all this volume, no reasonablycomprehensivesurvey of the
classicalUadition and modernism has been attempted, and the broad shape and scope
of the modernists' engagement with the classics remain unknown- An additional
¡S stumbling-block is that in many caseswe lack the fundamental scholarshipnecessary
o for critical inquir¡ including, for example, scholarly editions of most of the major
h rvorksof Eliot and Pound, or the publication of many of their letters. Most often the
useful secondary literature has examined more focused subjects. In two studies,
d Ziolkowski investigates modernists in their relation to Vergil (f993) and Ovid
). (2005), both in detail and with a wide perspective.In an earlier generation' critics
e investigated the reception of individual classicalthemes or figures and usually covered
c the mádern period, at least to some degree (see for example Stanford 1964 on
Ulysses,or Straussl97l on Orpheus).
l14 IQnneth Haynes

NOTES
term might limit
I Of the competingaccounrsof modernism,a narrow definition of the
might place its origin in
it largelyto *orks of l9l0-40; a more expansivedefinition
or in Britain or Germany of the
Fr"n." i' the last third of the nineteenthcentur¡
limits of the first half of thc
1890s. This chapter has adopted the chronological
twentieth century asits working basis.
2 With detailsfrom Frazer,asnoted by Carne-Ross1979:209-10'
poem
3 StephenPhillipspublishedhis versedrama(JlyssesinLg02;D'Annunzio's long
of his journey to imagines
Greece, contemporary encounters
Ui;a ItSOZ¡,a chronicle
with ancient characters,including Ulysses'
although several
4 It is not known for certain whích houros served as Rilke's model,
possibiüties have been discussed.
interpretation of
5 The deficiencies of Heidegger's account as an historically plausible
Plato are discussedin Friedlánder 1958:221-9'
,.lifelong favorite of Mandelstam's who may have felt that his fate in soviet
6 Ovid was a
2005: 67-73'
Russiawas that of ovid in exile" (Teffas 1966:259);see also Ziolkowski
of his corresponds to the sixth eclogue .
7 It is not known for certain which Poems