SOURCE: "The Aeneid," in The Noble Voice: A Study of Ten Great Poems, Henry Holt and Company, 1946, pp. 86–121.

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's criticism is aimed at the general reader, rather than the scholar or specialist, and is noted for its lively perception and wide interest. In the following essay, Van Doren discusses the historical and political perspective presented in the Aeneid. He also comments on Virgil's poetic style, finding its beauty a limitation as well as a...