The Georgics

Abstract

‘The best poem of the best poet’, said Dryden. And Spence (a generation or so later): ‘The most beautiful and most correct poem that ever was wrote in the Roman language.’ It is not hard to see why the Georgics had such a powerful appeal to the English Augustans, nor why the English Georgic became a poetic genre in its own right in the eighteenth century. The absolute control of the medium, the perfection of finish such as we do not find uniformly in the unrevised Aeneid, put it alongside Horace’s Odes as an example of artistic excellence of the highest degree. The elaborate diction, with its elevation of the ordinary and the common into ornate and cultivated paraphrase, naturally pleased those whose ears were attuned to listen for elegance, dignity, and propriety.