Rising from the Ruins: Roman Antiquities in Neoclassic Literature

The neoclassic tendency to write about the ruins of Rome was both an attempt to recapture the grandeur of the golden age of man and a lament for the passing of a great civilization. John Dyer, who wrote The Ruins of Rome in 1740, was largely responsible for the eighteenth-century revival of a unique subgenre of landscape poetry dealing with ruins of the ancient world. Few poems about the ruins had been written since Antiquites de Rome in 1558 by Joachim Du Bellay. Dyer was one of first neoclassic poets to return to the decaying stones of a past society as a source of poetic inspiration and imagination. He views the relics as monuments of grandeur and greatness, but also of impending death and destruction. While following most of the rules and standards of neoclassicism-that of imitating nature and giving pleasure to a reader-Dyer also includes his personal reactions and emotions in The Ruins of Rome. The work is composed from the position of a poet who serves as interpreter and translator of the subject, a primary characteristic of prospect poetry in the eighteenth century. Numerous other writers quickly followed Dyer's example, including George Keate, William Whitehead and William Parsons. The tendency by these poets to write about the ruins of Rome from a subjective point of view was one of the strongest themes in what Northrop Frye has called the Age of Sensibility. Although the renewed interest in Roman ruins lasted well into the nineteenth century, influencing Romantic poets from Lord Byron to William Wordsworth, the evolution of this type of verse was a gradual process: it originated with Du Bellay's poem, continued through seventeenth-century paintings by Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa (along with the later art of Piranesi and Pannini), and reached maturity with the poetic interest in the imagination in the eighteenth century. All of these factors, especially the tendency of poets to record their subjective feelings and insights concerning the ruins, are elements that proved to be instrumental in the eventual development of Romanticism.

Dr. Bruce C. Swaffield, Professor in the School of Communication and the Arts at Regent University (Virginia Beach, Virginia), is the Founder and Director of the Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture, which meets annually in Rome, Italy. He is a specialist in neoclassic literature dealing with Roman antiquities, and has conducted research on-site both in the United Kingdom and Italy.