Off the Dusty Bookshelf: Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape
By: John Byron Kuhner
Tags: Poetry, Italy, Reviews, Gilbert Highet, Classics

I’m sure it was magical when Highet traveled Italy with his poets in his pockets, just as it’s magical now. Who wouldn’t want to visit Sirmio, Verona, and Rome with Catullus, even if only on the page? Who isn’t affected by the merest suggestion that Romeo, in his passion for Juliet and murderous rage at Tybalt, might possess a similar emotional register with Catullus? Highet himself says nothing, but merely concludes his Catullus essay in Verona, and the man’s need for Rome to truly live, with the lines

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

And to go to Assisi with Propertius, and Sulmona with Ovid; to know that Highet made his pilgrimage to Vergil’s tomb, and Horace’s Villa, and the Fons Bandusiae — to read descriptions of these places, to feel that another human being loved them as we do — it is just wonderful.

Highet is also a writer. A real writer. He has a gift for explaining things, as with Vergil’s relationship to farming, which is far more nuanced than the dismissive “city poet idealizes country life” one sometimes hears; and yet Highet does most of the necessary work in a single paragraph:

He showed how complex it was, how much will-power and application it demanded, how many threats from natural disasters and from diseases confronted it. He made it honourable, but not noble [how much of Vergil is in those seven words!]. He did not attempt to disguise or glorify the primitive and often sordid life of the farmer. He used words and images that were kept strangers to elevated poetry: dung, spittle, slime, sweat, weeds, pigs, tar. But he emphasized that, for all their difficulty and poverty, the farmers still lived a life of natural wealth, unlike the factitious wealth of city people, and of natural peace of mind. Their chief fault, he said, was that they scarcely realized their own happiness. And at the end of the second book of the Georgics he broke out into a splendid paean of praise for the two lives he most admired: the life of philosophy and science, which understands the secrets of the cosmos, and which can rise above the terrors of false religion, and the life of the lover of nature, who can live far from the crowded cities, among the hills and woods and rivers where men are less important than the indwelling spirits that outlive many human generations, but where men are closer to the real secrets of earth, their patient and expectant mother. (65)

Here is how Highet introduces Catullus:

He came from the north. He lived a brief, passionate, unhappy life. He wrote magnificent poetry. And he introduced a new word for ‘kiss’ into the European languages. Although he was a superb poet, only one solitary copy of his poems survived the Dark Ages — a single battered manuscript, preserved in his home, Verona. Yet, even if that lovely copy had perished and all his poems had been lost, one of his creations would have remained. Whenever a Frenchman says baiser, whenever an Italian speaks of un bacio, when a Spaniard says besar or a Portuguese beijar, they are using the word which this poet picked up and made into Latin to amuse his sweetheart. The woman was unworthy. The poet died. The word lives. (17)

I had never heard the contention that Catullus coined the term basium after a Celtic word from Cisalpine Gaul. I don’t believe it myself: all I think we can say is that the word is absent from Roman literature before Catullus, notably from Roman Comedy where it should be at home. But whether you believe it or not, Highet’s paragraph is dynamic and accessible. There’s passion, unhappiness, death, the Dark Ages, sweethearts, kissing. This is a Classics professor who cares about making you care. And he actually cut a figure in the American cultural scene in the 1950s. He chose books for the “Book of the Month Club,” which had an Oprah-esque circulation. He wrote popular paperbacks. He had his own NPR show (where you can hear how multiple rereads got him to love Vergil, an author he “hated”).

And there is much we Classicists can learn from Highet, not only as a popularizer, but as an insightful exponent and critic. He deals with Horace’s poems in chronological order: I really had never considered how the Odes should be read in context of the Satires, or the Epistles in context of the Odes. These are the virtues of taking an overview of the subject, which we modern Classicists so often fail to do. Indeed to have essays on all of Latin’s greatest poets in a single volume is necessarily an overview, but when done well it is time very well spent. Highet’s Horace essay is a marvel of deep appreciation for a poet who is, I think, more respected than loved, and more unknown than respected. And his Ovid essay is a deeply critical and ultimately morally censorious in a way that really illumines how different the postwar era is from our own.

There is a natural human tendency to idealize what is gone, which should put us on alert whenever we are tempted to rhapsodize about the past. In general, for a person such as me, born poor, I feel that there is no time better than the present. I can see how the opportunities given me have far transcended anything offered my grandparents, none of whom even attended high school. But it is hard not to admire and rhapsodize a bit about the American universities in the time immediately after the Second World War. Horrifying conflict with highly educated Fascists and Communists forced the American universities to come up with educational ideals which transcended vague cliches like “scholarship” or “critical thinking.” Everyone knew that university chemistry, economics, biology, psychology, and urban planning expertise contributed to such atrocities as concentration camps and gulags. The challenge was to make a world that never had to see such things again, and “scholarship” or “critical thinking” were obviously insufficient for such a task. Meanwhile, Fascist and Communist persecutions had driven exceptional talent to American institutions. Government-financed tuition supplied by the G.I. Bill democratized university education as never before. But scholars like Highet were not content to find the doors of Columbia University swung open a bit wider than before. They took to the radio and the press, to find students outside their institutions. They believed high school students — one of the target markets for Poets in a Landscape — could be making critical judgements about Propertius and Tibullus. They were setting the stage for the coeducation and desegregation that would come in my parents’ generation and continue to the present. In their popularizing tendencies, pedagogical skill, and personal passion, we still have much to learn from them.