by Titus Bicknell
[Bicknell, Titus. "Calamus Ense Potentiro Est: Walter Savage Landor's
Poetic War of Words." Romanticism On the Net 4
(November 1996) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/landor.html>]
In an essay championing the cause of Latin composition, Walter Savage
Landor, then nineteen and recently sent down from
Oxford for shooting at a fellow undergraduate, wrote:
Siquid forte iocosius cuivis in mentem veniat,
id, vernacule , puderet, non enim tantummodo in luce agitur sed
etiam in publico. Idem Latine neque indecens
neque invenustum foret; quippe quod minime sit publici iuris, et nec
ad aures nisi castigatas obversetur. (1)
[If perhaps something playful comes to mind
it would cause shame in the vernacular, for it not only happens in the
light but also in public. The same thing would
be neither indecent nor unattractive in Latin, in as much as it is in no
way a mark of public jurisdiction, nor for
hearing unless directed towards restrained ears.]
By applying this principle I have endeavoured to obviate the shame inherent
in using such a trite cliche in my title by rendering it
in Latin, though I hope through the course of this paper to illustrate
the degree to which the pen really is mightier than sword.
Within the life and works of Landor there are two important battles
on which the frame of poetry and history can be brought to
bear - the Latin battle Landor waged against the vernacular politics
and poetry of his day, and the surreptitious battle fought
against Landor's Latin by his critics and biographers. In an anachronistic
move that I shall justify later, let us start with this
posthumous critical battle in which Landor was unable to defend himself,
before turning to his Latin poems and their significance
for the revolutionary zeitgeist in which Landor found himself.
Few people have lived as long or as fully as Walter Savage Landor, whose
literary career alone spans almost seventy years
from 1795 to 1863, and fewer still embody Shakespeare's description
of the seven ages of man more fittingly. Though there is
little documentary evidence of Landor's "Mewling and puking in the
nurse's arms" (2) the irascible nature of his adult character
suggests that he was probably no angel as a baby. His schooling was
tumultuous; he was not only asked to leave Rugby for
suggesting in print that his Latin poems, judged worthy of a half-day
holiday for the whole school, were "pessima carminum
quae Landor unquam scripsit", but was also - as we have seen - sent
down from Oxford for perilous experiments in ballistics
that would have worried even William Tell. As "the lover,/Sighing like
furnace, with a woeful ballad/Made to his mistress'
eyebrow", he was perhaps too successful and by the publication of his
first volume of poems in 1795 Landor, then aged
nineteen, had fathered an illegitimate child and faced dis-inheritance
for living with his lover, Nancy Jones, and their daughter,
Anne, in Swansea. The child died and his relationship with Nancy was
superseded by another, the ardour of which was to
sustain Landor throughout his life. Sophia Jane Swift, later the Countess
de Molande, captured Landor's heart in 1803 and,
since she was already engaged to a cousin, their relationship was never
formalised or legitimated. She therefore became
Landor's Beatrice, or perhaps more accurately Maud Gonne, and is immortalised
in Landor's poems as Ianthe. They
conducted an affair before and during Jane Swift's first marriage by
skating between the indulgences and taboos of 19th century
British society and the necessary discretion and reticence to which
Landor was bound led to passionate poetic outbursts. In a
poem reminiscent of Sulpicia's "Tandem venit amor", (3) Landor lamented
that
Nec possum tibi nec tuis amicis
Quod summo mihi pendet usque labro
Proferre; heu cadit illud, intimoque
Fundo pectoris omnibusque fibris
Exardet. (4)
[Neither to you nor to your friends can I utter
what constantly hangs from my upper lip; alas it falls, and burns
from the most intimate foundation and from
every fibre of my heart.]
Yet in Landor's case the revelation of this love is tantamount to silence
since even the object of the poem could not understand
Latin. It was Ianthe's resolve to remain with her husband that pushed
Landor to become "a soldier,/ . . . Seeking the bubble
reputation/Even in the cannon's mouth." On the eve of his departure
to Spain in 1808 to lead a legion of volunteers against the
invading French army, Landor claimed in verse
Et quoniam mentem non verteret, ire coegit
Quo vocat abreptus turbine Martis Iber. (5)
[And because she would not change her mind,
she forced me to go whither Spain called, torn apart by the
commotion of war.]
Despite seeing no active service, Landor returned to England a decorated
Spanish hero, and set about establishing an estate at
Llanthony in Wales where his attempts to become a magistrate in 1812
were foiled by the Duke of Beaufort. Though Landor
was "Full of wise saws and modern instances" an early attack of gout
pledged him against rich foods and he never sported the
"fair round belly with good capon lin'd" that was perhaps the more
important qualification for the job. To play "the lean and
slipper'd pantaloon", Landor appropriately left England for Italy as
a result of a libel suit brought against him by one of his
tenants. From 1815 until 1863 Landor charmed the expatriate community
in Florence, save an interlude in Bath that ended with
his fleeing a second libel charge, and fended off the "mere oblivion
[of] second childishness" until he finally died aged eighty-nine
"Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything" as his protege,
Kate Field, alluded in her article in The Atlantic Monthly for
April, 1866.
With so much living to contend with, it is hardly surprising that Landor's
story has been told by six different biographers, one of
whom made two meticulous attempts at it, but sadly these efforts to
elucidate the complete Landor have consistently amputated
crucial elements - none more so than the Latin opera that constitute
his greatest and most prolonged endeavour. Though the
halcyon days of neo-Latin had passed before Landor enjoyed his salad
days, Landor fought a Quixotic battle beneath the Latin
standard, but, unlike King Canute, seemed convinced that his Latin
verse and prose could resist the vernacular tide that swept
through literary and academic circles in the latter half of the eighteenth
century. His armoury includes no less than three hundred
Latin poems, political tracts and essays, all of which are steeped
in classical and neo-Latin allusion and rich in the verisimilitude
that characterises excellent fiction.
It is perhaps his longevity, or the anachronistic and atavistic style
he chose to employ that has precluded him from the canon of
Romantic and Victorian literature, but there has been no cessation
in the efforts of scholars and biographers to promote him to
a position commensurate with his poetic endeavours. He had scarcely
breathed his last before biographers and historians began
squabbling over the carrion of his literary estate in order to begin
the litany of biographies and selected editions that have
periodically augmented Landor's oeuvre. While some of these works are
sycophantic, extolling their authors more than the
subject of their inquest, much conscientious biographical and textual
analysis of Landor's life and works has been achieved,
particularly by Malcolm Elwin, R. H. Super and the indomitable team
of Stephen Wheeler and T. Earle Welby, who produced
The Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor in sixteen volumes between
1927 and 1936. All such efforts have, however,
side-stepped Landor's anomalous position in literary history by making
almost no mention of his Latin. Indeed, the
comprehensive edition of Wheeler and Welby contains none of his Latin
poetry or prose. (6) By eliding the Latin texts,
Landor's biographers and critics have removed a facet from their commentaries
that leaves us with a two-dimensional portrait
of a figure more than worthy of being sculpted in three.
Despite a consensus among Landor critics that the Latin texts have been
greatly neglected and that, as R. H. Super intimates, "a
careful study of Landor's Latin writings would be one of the most fruitful
undertakings upon which the Landor student could
embark," (7) discussions of his Latinity have to date been marginal
and cursory. Leicester Bradner devotes a section to Landor
in Musae Anglicanae - his seminal survey of British Neo-Latin from
1500-1925 - but acknowledges that it is "merely a
preliminary attack on the problem". (8) In The Latin poetry of English
Poets, Andrea Kelly takes up Super's call to arms and
extends Bradner's initial stab, providing a detailed account of the
major themes of Landor's shorter poems against a backdrop
of 19th century history and politics. And John Buxton, echoing Super's
astute comment on Landor's English verse that his "style
is rather Hellenistic . . . than Hellenic" (9) provides a fascinating
analysis of Landor's unrealised aspirations to be a Greek poet
in his book The Grecian Taste . (10) Among the biographers, however,
little more than lip service has been paid to Landor's
greatest endeavour, thereby privileging his English writings. That
Landor published in Italian as well is barely mentioned,
confirming an implicit linguistic prejudice and xenophobia on the part
of Landor's anglophone biographers. This view is
supported by Pierre Vitoux's exquisite French study, L'Oeuvre de Walter
Savage Landor , which not only considers the Latin
works within the wider body of Landor's literary output, but examines
the classical influences and stylistic allusions displayed in
the poems. Since Latin and English are equally foreign to Vitoux, he
treats Landor's works as a unified corpus, and, though his
analysis is not exhaustive, this text provides a valuable schema for
future Landor criticism in English. (11)
To address the geographical expulsion inherent in the biographical treatment
of Landor's work, I should like to enlist the help of
David Nye, whose book, The Invented Self , offers a brilliant challenge
and alternative to the strictures of traditional
biography. By cataloguing as an example the vast archive of information
about Thomas Edison, Nye designs an anti-biography,
whose aim is to avoid the construction of a single identity through
the elision of contradictory or distasteful evidence, while
positing a topography of the individual free from the epistemological
desire for origins. As Nye points out:
The anti-biography assumes that there are no
primary sources and that therefore there are no "secondary"
sources. It decenters the entire notion of
source itself necessary as a mythic underpinning to writing a life and
reconnects documents to the cultural systems
that produce them. These systems expressed as structures in the
documents become the subject of the anti-biography.
The individual ceases to exist as a unitary object and
becomes only a series of meeting points, a
pattern of possibilities.... [Thus the subject] can be mapped, but there
is no single way to follow the lines of connection
on that map. The reader must grasp the work as a set of
relationships, not as a sequence of events.
(12)
Allowing history to be read as a space, rather than as linear time,
the need to establish chronology and hierarchy among aspects
of the subject's life is removed, thus neutralising the temptation
to offer as an historical document a traditional narrative or as
Nye defines it a "literary artifact whose form creates much of the
meaning we find in it". (13) The importance of this model to
Landor's biography can be attested by a single example.
All Landor's biographers are quick to cite the caricature of Landor
that appears in Dickens's Bleak House, with particular
emphasis on the accuracy of the portrayal as evidence of the deep friendship
and literary affinity that existed between the two
men. Indeed in the figure of Lawrence Boythorn, Dickens captures, in
a few impressionistic brush strokes, the manner and style
of Landor that most commended him as a man. His impetuous sense of
fair play and chivalry - inflamed to hyperbolic
proportions by the slightest affront to feminine virtue or generosity
- and the florid, sometimes purple, prose he used to
condemn those he deemed guilty of such crimes, appear in a handful
of perspicacious descriptions. What few have admitted is
the convenience of perceiving the enormous detail and complexity of
Landor's life through Dickens's loveable caricature. Fiction
is so much more manageable than fact and what follows is a series of
adulatory biographies in which the unpleasant and
contradictory elements of Landor are dismissed because they do not
fit the character of Boythorn. It was Malcolm Elwin who
blew the whistle on his predecessors, (14) and, in an effort to compensate,
produced his second biography of Landor,
ironically entitled Landor: a replevin , which contains such a litany
of indiscretions and personal details that one is left doubting
the facts for their sheer volume and irrefutable nature. Elwin's effort
to account for every element of Landor's life as part of a
unitary subject leaves the reader with a legal or scientific account
devoid of humanity and personal spark. But the traditional
form of biographical investigation demands this series of contradictory
challenges to the established portrayals of previous
biographers: a process akin to successive literary patricide. Fiction
is not, however, bound by the same rules and a closer look
at Bleak House reveals that Dickens extends Landor's caricature far
beyond the figure of Boythorn in a move consistent with
Nye's topological stance on biography. Recognisable Landorian traits
appear predominantly in the boisterous frame of
Boythorn, but the character of Richard, the young ward in the notorious
Jarndyce case, whose naive faith in the legal system to
return a favourable verdict leads to his slow demise at the hands of
a debilitating disease, offers an uncanny resemblance to the
young Landor, complete with details of his failure to finish school.
Dickens's character Esther recounts that Richard
had been eight years in a public school, had
learnt, I understood, to make Latin Verses of several sorts, in the
most admirable manner. . . . He had been adapted
to the Verses, and had learnt the art of making them to such
perfection, that if he had remained at school
until he was of age, I suppose he could have gone on making them
over and over again. . . . [A]lthough I had
no doubt that they were very beautiful, and very improving, and very
sufficient for a great many purposes of life,
and always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether Richard
would not have profited by some one studying
him a little instead of his studying them quite so much. (15)
Aware that Landor could not be characterised by a single fictional account,
Dickens offers the reader two simultaneous facets
of one man in two stages of his life, juxtaposing radically different
characteristics in a manner impossible within chronological
biography. Dickens has created a topography of Landor in which youth
and maturity are contiguous sites, albeit defined as
separate characters, unrelated place names as it were. This fictional
space provides room for more reality than a documentation
of reality allows, by figuring a given subject as his many selves.
What remains problematic is that in order to analyse one of
those selves the other permutations must be put aside, exiled from
the discourse, thereby returning to the familiar 'take' on
Landor in which one linguistic practice is given precedence over another.
To examine Landor's Latin opera without merely inverting the familiar
hierarchy that has privileged his English works requires
more than simply elevating Latin to the same status awarded to English.
There is no doubt that collecting the Latin poems and
essays from the assorted slim volumes and pamphlets in which Landor
published them, thereby providing the missing
seventeenth volume to the Complete Works of Wheeler and Welby, is an
essential prerequisite to the writing of "a satisfactory
essay upon them" (16) as Leicester Bradner clearly indicates. Any analysis
of those texts must, however, embrace a critical
stance that resists, as Nye explains, a simple "recovery" of the unitary
self, in which "all contradictions must be overcome rather
than explored in the quest". (17) It must recognise instead the "underlying
coherence" achieved when, in the words of Michel
Foucault, these "immediately visible contradictions. . . this display
of dispersed light [is] concentrated into a single focus." (18)
For the subject Walter Savage Landor, the "underlying coherence" is
a topography that charts not only his familiar territory as
an English poet, but also the new world of his Latin opera.
The most prominent feature on this map is Landor's appeal to authorities
other than those he was born to. Since a particular
language system implies the authority of a given nation, Landor's use
of Latin invokes an alternative to English authority, one
perhaps that he put more faith in considering he held British politicians
and the monarch of the day in contempt. Ironically at that
time in England one could not be sued for libel if the offending remark
was made in Latin, further evidence that Latin was
perceived to be above and beyond the law.
The most alarming examples occur in a group of Inscriptiones published
in 1847 in which Landor constructed epitaphs for
those he admired as well as those he despised. As Andrea Kelly, in
The Latin Poetry of English Poets , so elegantly put it
"death was not necessarily a prerequisite for an epitaph from Landor,
who considered the desirability of certain people's
decease to be in itself sufficient." (19) One example will be sufficient
to indicate the severity of these fictitious tombstones, and
after the exceptional programme, A Royal Scandal, I have chosen that
of George IV, whose cruel treatment of Caroline of
Brunswick was matched only by the intensity of her revenge or the vitriol
of Landor's slander.
Heic. jacet,
Qui. ubique. et. semper. jacebat
Familiae. pessimae. homo. pessimus
Georgius. Britanniae. Rex. ejus. nominis.
IV
Arca. ut. decet. ampla. et. opipare. ornata.
est
Continet. enim. omnes. Nerones. (20)
[Here lies the man
who, while alive, lay everywhere and always.
The worst man of the worst family,
George, King of England, fourth of that name.
It is fitting that the sepulchre be large
and sumptuously decorated,
it contains a whole family of Neros.]
In much the same way that Landor expressed the intensity of his illicit
relationship with Ianthe in Latin to avoid the censure of
19th century mores, his political poems seem to invoke an authority
beyond or even above the British legal system of the day. It
is an appeal to fas rather than ius that Landor carried a stage further
in his poems of support for the Italian cause during the
Risorgimento. By the time Garibaldi began his campaign against the
Papal forces and the occupying French army, Landor had
lived in Italy for twenty years and in his most explicit invocation
of the ancient Roman republic he wrote
Dum patrio sermone meo celebrare parabam
Facta tua, Italiae gloria summa, Liger!
Hoc monitu calamum correptum Musa repressit
"Conveniunt potius verba latina duci.
Ille quidem Liger est, sed et est Romanus,
et Urbem
Tutatus, vindex protulit arma foras.
Concinuere tubae fulgentque sub Alpibus illa
. .
Quo fugit Austriacus? quo fugit iste minax?
Libertatem alii produnt, victricia f dant.
Signa, sed absimilis regibus unus adest:
Ergo Romana Garibaldus voce canendus
Atque inter fastos concelebrandus erit." (21)
[While I was preparing to celebrate your deeds,
with my native tongue, highest glory of Italy, Ligurian, the Muse
repressed my pen having been snatched up with
this warning "Latin words are more fitting to the leader. Indeed he
is a Ligurian, but he is also a Roman, and
having protected the City, he extended the defences outside as a
protector. The trumpets of war sounded and
gleamed beneath the Alps. Whither flees the Austrian? whither flees
that threatener? Others betray liberty, defile
victorious signs, but one man unlike kings is present: Therefore
Garibaldi will need to be sung of with a Roman
voice and to be celebrated among the festival days."]
Not only does the poem echo the opening of Ovid's Amores where Cupid
intercedes to create the heroic couplet by stealing a
foot from every second line, but it places Garibaldi in an historical
succession that reinforces his claim. Though Liger is not the
normal appellation for a Ligurian, and could well be a printing mistake
for Ligur , (22) it seems likely that Landor, aware that
Garibaldi was born in Nice, evokes this ancient race as his direct
ancestors much as Henry V used the Salic law to claim the
throne of France. Landor takes this classical comparison further in
a direct comparison with the Roman general Fabius, whose
delay tactics caused the attrition of Hannibal's troops and put an
end to the Carthaginian invasion. By developing an almost
exact quotation of a fragment in praise of Fabius by Ennius, (23) Landor
bolstered Garibaldi with more historical verisimilitude:
Unus homo Romae cunctando restituit Rem;
Restituet non cunctando (deus adiuvet!) alter.
(24)
[One man restored the Roman republic by delaying; a second (god willing) will restore it by not.]
As Garibaldi's success was assured, Landor strengthened his opinion in a second poem:
Unus homo Romae cunctando restituit Rem:
At non cunctando restituet melior:
Vive, vale, Garibalde! parat tibi certa triumphos,
Iam gladio fracto perfidus hostis abit. (25)
[One man restored the Roman republic by delaying:
but a better man will restore it by not: live, be strong,
Garibaldi! certainty prepares victories for
you, already the treacherous foe flees with a broken sword.]
Significantly libel laws in Italy extended to Latin, as Landor discovered
to his horror in 1818 when he was expelled from Como
for writing verses against the Prefect of the city. (26) Thus his Latin
encomia for Garibaldi were a direct challenge to the Papal
authorities but have a seal of Classical approval on which he built
his case. Landor's challenge to human law resembles the
challenge that Jacques Lacan has seen posed by Antigone. (27) She buries
her brother Polynices, Lacan posits, to fulfill the
Gods law--fas -- and thereby prevent them from taking offence, but
in so doing breaks the human law--ius --pronounced by
Creon. Landor appealed to Antigone's position by breaking the law of
Papal Rome, but ironically he did so by using Latin, the
language with which the Church attempted to make its own law divine.
Fortunately for Landor his fate was not as severe as
Antigone's, but the dual exile he suffered, first from the vernacular
by choosing to write in Latin and second because his views,
when expressed in English, forced him to flee England, left him isolated
from both mother tongue and father land. Where he
went, however, can be most clearly explained by examining the case
of another old man whose relationship to Latin allowed
him an escape from his surroundings.
In her novel The Old Man and the Wolves , Julia Kristeva shrouds the
Bulgaria of her childhood and the death of her own
father, a Classics professor, who died in a military hospital there,
in an intricate psychological detective story. The old man of
the title, Septicius Clarus, is also a Latin teacher convinced that
his home in Santa Varvara is being overrun by wolves, but fears
the people themselves are metamorphosing into wolves. The old man retreats
from his nightmares into the love poetry of
Tibullus and Ovid until he dies mysteriously in a hospital under the
care of Dr Vespasian. Kristeva has underpinned the entire
novel with Latin quotations and references and one senses that the
old man's plight is deeply ironic. Latin, the language of
Rome, itself nurtured in the myth of Romulus and Remus by a she-wolf,
sustains the old man until he finally loses his life at the
hands of a wolf. The cycle is unbreakable and offers no cure, but escape
is in one sense possible. Part of Kristeva's theoretical
writing addresses poetic language and the semiotic: the choric register
where poetry like prayer gains meaning from its ritual
repetition. (28) It is this embrocation that the old man seeks in Latin
poems, and insists on reading and rereading, citing and
reciting them, not merely for their meaning but for what cannot be
translated into another language.
With this in mind, Landor's Latin becomes more poignant. Perhaps his
most telling comment occurs at the very end of essay he
wrote to explain why neo-Latin authors were read less or not at all
during the 19th century. He said: "literatis omnibus, et nobis
praecipue qui latine scribimus, [for all educated people especially
us who write in Latin] Roma patria est". (29) He is clearly not
referring to the 19th century city, bludgeoned by Papal control, but
to Urbs Romana as the metonym of Roman
Republicanism. As Freud, in his famous essay "Civilisation and its
Discontents", describes Rome "not as a human habitation but
[as] a psychic entity" (30) in which all of its archaeological layers
can be perceived simultaneously, so Landor maps ancient and
modern history through the common medium of Latin, thereby creating
a mental space to inhabit with all the rights of a Roman
citizen. As Julia Kristeva aptly describes it:
the screen of dreams doesn't go blank immediately
when the body starts to withdraw toward the void. The organs
may deteriorate . . [b]ut a kind of speech
remains. Not necessarily articulate or audible or communicable, though
it should be that too. And that pulse persisted
stubbornly in the Old Man. It went on displaying a dream life that
was fiercer and thus infinitely more living
than his now enfeebled body. It wasn't that [he] wanted to cling at all
costs to a world that had driven him to despair.
. . . It was rather that he was now autonomous, detached from his
departing body because of the artificial existence
he had created for himself, from childhood onward, by learning
to speak, read, write, and even identify with
a dead language. Dead for his contemporaries, but for him a source
of revelation, showing there was such a thing
as the happy chance of being able to live in the mind. (31)
It is here that we find both Septicius Clarus warding off the wolves
and Landor spinning out his time in search of peers long
dead and a place that no longer exists per se though its bricks and
mortar still provide a tempting mirage.
Notes
(1) W. S. Landor, The Poems of W. S. Landor (London: Cadell & Davies, 1795) pp. 216-17. (back)
(2) William Shakespeare, As You Like It , II.vii. (back)
(3) J. P. Postgate, trans., Tibullus (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann
Ltd., 1966) p. 332. (back)
(4) W. S. Landor, Idyllia Heroica Decem (Pisa: Nistri, 1820) p. 160. (back)
(5) W. S. Landor, Poemata & Inscriptiones (London: Moxon, 1847) p. 214. (back)
(6) In his book, L' uvre de Walter Savage Landor , Pierre Vitoux clarifies
that certain English texts were also excluded from
Welby's prose section of the Complete Works (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1964, 449). (back)
(7) R. H. Super, 'Walter Savage Landor', The English Romantic Poets
and Essayists: a review of research and criticism ,
ed. C. W. & L. H. Houtchens (revised ed.. New York and London:
1966) p. 246. (back)
(8) Leicester Bradner, Musae Anglicanae: a History of Anglo-Latin Poetry
1500-1925 (London: Oxford University Press;
New York: Modern Languages Association of America, 1940) p. 316. (back)
(9) R. H. Super, 'Walter Savage Landor' p. 247. (back)
(10) John Buxton, 'Walter Savage Landor', in Grecian Taste: Literature
in the Age of Neo-Classicism 1740-1820 (London:
Macmillan, 1978) pp. 105-27. (back)
(11) See Arthur Symons, 'Walter Savage Landor', in his The Romantic
Movement in English Poetry [(London: Archibald
Constable & Co., 1909) pp. 172-189] as one of the rare cases in
which Landor's Latin poetry is analysed with English as a
unified corpus. (back)
(12) David Nye, The Invented Self (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 1983) pp. 12-13. (back)
(13) David Nye, The Invented Self p. 11. (back)
(14) Malcolm Elwin, 'Introduction' to Landor: a biographical anthology
, ed. Herbert van Thal (London: Allen & Unwin,
1973) pp. 14-17. (back)
(15) Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-3) (New York: Bantam, 1989) pp. 155-56. (back)
(16) Leicester Bradner, loc. cit.. (back)
(17) David Nye, The Invented Self p. 74. (back)
(18) Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972)
p. 150, quoted in David Nye, The Invented Self p. 74. (back)
(19) Andrea Kelly, 'The Latin Poetry of Walter Savage Landor', in The
Latin Poetry of English Poets , edited by J. W.
Binns (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1974) p. 167. (back)
(20) W. S. Landor, Poemata & Inscritpiones (London: Moxon, 1847) p. 259. (back)
(21) W. S. Landor, Heroic Idyls (London: Newby, 1863) p. 282. (back)
(22) The publication of this volume was fraught with technical difficulties,
and it is recorded that Landor, enraged by the finished
product, sent a corrected copy back to the printer and demanded that
it be reprinted. R. H. Super convincingly argues that the
effect caused by this shoddy work on a man of eighty-nine with a well-attested
irascibility, led to Landor's death shortly after.
[Walter Savage Landor (London: John Calder, 1957) pp. 500-501] (back)
(23) Annalia Book XII "Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem". [fragment
363 in The Annals of Q. Ennius , ed. Otto
Skutch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) p. 102] (back)
(24) W. S. Landor, Heroic Idyls (London: Newby, 1863) p. 301. (back)
(25) W. S. Landor, Heroic Idyls (London: Newby, 1863) p. 308. (back)
(26) See Malcolm Elwin, Landor: a replevin (London: Macdonald, 1958) p. 181. (back)
(27) See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60: the Seminar
of Jacques Lacan, Book VII (London:
Routledge, 1992). (back)
(28) See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). (back)
(29) W. S. Landor, Poemata & Inscriptiones (London: Moxon, 1847) p. 348. (back)
(30) Sigmund Freud, "Civilisation and its Discontents" The Freud Reader
, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989) p. 726.
(back)
(31) Julia Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves , trans. Barbara Bray
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) pp.
112-13. (back)
Titus Bicknell
University of York
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