Graver's texts, notes, and introductions provide a context for close study and major reassessment of Wordsworth's relationship to two poets whose enormous influence on the development of his own poetry has been relatively neglected in scholarship and criticism. Virgil, of course, would have been a staple of his education from an early age. The volume also will be of great value to scholars interested in the development of Wordsworth's theories of poetic diction, and in specifics of the relationship between neoclassical and romantic poetry and poetics. Graver has argued elsewhere the key issue emphasized here, that Wordsworth's Aeneid work represents a deliberate attempt to translate according to principles very different from Dryden's. In any work exhibiting such complexity of detail, there are bound to be a few mistakes.
Quotation marks cause trouble at several points.
Such minor errata by no means subtract from the impressive scholarship on display throughout this volume. Graver's book is a distinguished contribution to a great scholarly enterprise. Ernest de Selincourt, rev.