Van Doren was one of the most prolific men of letters in twentieth-century American writing. His work includes poetry (his Collected Poems 1922–1938 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940), novels, short stories, drama, criticism, social commentary, and the editing of a number of popular anthologies. He wrote accomplished studies of Shakespeare, John Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, and served as literary editor and film critic for the Nation during the 1920s and 1930s. Van Doren'...

In the following essay, Shairp examines changing religious practices during the reign of Augustus, how these changes are embodied in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, and how Virgil's theological views impacted western literature.

Perhaps the most influential poet and critic to write in the English language during the first half of the twentieth century, Eliot is closely identified with many of the qualities denoted by the term Modernism: experimentation, formal complexity, artistic and intellectual eclecticism, and a classicist's view of the artist working at an emotional distance from his or her creation. He introduced a number of terms and concepts that strongly affected critical thought in his lifetime, among them the ide...

Mackail was an English critic, biographer, and educator whose books include The Springs of Helicon (1909) and Studies in Humanism (1938). Primarily devoted to the study of Greek and English poetry, his work displays the a scholarly approach to literature, as well as a belief that the development of poetry is an organic process. In the excerpt below, Mackail traces the development of Vergil's skill from the Eclogues through the Georgics, culminating in the mature style displayed in the Aeneid.

A prominent English statesman and man of letters, Addison, along with Richard Steele, is considered one of the most important essayists of the early eighteenth century. With Steele, he founded the influential daily the Spectator, which was launched with the avowed purpose of improving the morals and manners of the day. Addison's best essays, those in which he adopted the persona of the fictional country squire Sir Roger de Coverley, are tren-chant, pointed observations of life, literature, and socie...

In the following excerpt, Spence notes that Virgil's delineation of such defeated characters as Juno, Dido, and Turnus suggests a sympathy for the very human traits that the "male" rhetorical model represses—impulsiveness, rebellion, bellion, and passion—and attests to the need for a more tolerant and less hierarchical view of humankind.