Languages that Want the Living Voice: Latin and Early Romanticism

Abstract This essay reconsiders the relationship between the composition of modern Latin verse and the development of English Romantic poetics, by uncovering the influence of the practice of Latinization—the translation of English poetry into Latin—upon a lineage of eighteenth-century writers from Vincent Bourne to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Revising the opposition between the ‘dangerous craft of picking phrases out / From languages that want the living voice’ and ‘real language’, it argues that Bourne cultivated a distinctively modest and modern Latin style, in part by Latinizing popular English songs; this style then influenced Christopher Smart, Samuel Johnson, William Cowper and Wordsworth. Reading neglected Latin versions of works from Pope’s ‘Ode for Music’ to Cowper’s ‘The Cast-Away’, it shows that (self-)Latinization was a generative, expressive practice for some ‘early Romantic’ poets, and that its influence is often legible in their best-known vernacular works. In these cases, Latinity fostered rather than stymied the development of the poetic values typically associated with Romanticism, such as familiarity, simplicity and self-expression. The overlooked trend of Bournean Latinization can even be read as anticipating some of the flaws in the logic of Wordsworth’s 1802 preface, rather than exemplary of the sins it describes. Ultimately, the poetics of Lyrical Ballads are shown to be not quite as anti-Latinate as its authors assumed.