In volume, at least, the American age of translation from classical poetry has already far surpassed the Elizabethan and Augustan ages. The tide of verse really began to flow with Lattimore’s Iliad and the Chicago Complete Greek Tragedies in the 1950s; yet even now, at least two Iliads, three Odysseys, three Aeneids, and uncounted Greek dramas later, we still look in vain for any informed survey of this staggering literary phenomenon, let alone of its impact on American education, American taste, and American poetry itself.

Anyone who undertook such a survey would probably have to begin by recognizing the single most profound difference between our twentieth-century verse translators and their Elizabethan and Augustan predecessors. In those ages most of the reading public knew and loved the Greek and Latin classics in the original tongues. What they asked about the latest translation of, say, a Roman satire was not whether it rendered the Latin words literally but whether it was itself an English poem worthy to rank with the original: how had the translator matched this stroke of Latin wit, or that sudden shift of rhythm, or that epigrammatic formulation, in such a way that his English verses, also, should haunt the memory like a tune? So, where Juvenal had written Omnia novit/ Graeculus esuriens; in caelum insseris ibit (“The hungry Greekling knows it all; he’ll go to Heaven if you tell him to”), Samuel Johnson wrote with quite equal pungency:

All Sciences a