Critics have routinely voiced their frustrations with William Carlos Williams’s term ‘measure’. But from the late 1930s onwards, he compared his idea of ‘measure’ to the science of measurement. This chapter suggests, first, that to fully appreciate Williams’s measure, one must understand how the science of measurement frequently appeared in the vocabulary of a variety of contemporaneous critics of poetry. In so doing, it sketches a lineage of scientific criticism that began in the late nineteenth century and that shaped modernist theories of prosody. Second, by close reading Williams’s long poem Paterson (1963), it suggests that by rejecting the term ‘rhythm’ and reprising ‘measure’, Williams was attempting to define the knowledge practices proper to poetry in an era where to measure was to know.

In the decades of Romanticism a new view on culture emerged: one in which culture was nationally specific (each nation having its own characteristic cultural traditions) and should be seen as process of historical development (rather than the condition of being civilized and refined). In the emergence of this new, historicist and nationally specific idea of culture, an initial impetus was provided by the ‘discovery’ in the 1760s of the epic poems of the ancient Scottish bard Ossian. The figure of Ossian amplified the aesthetics of the ‘sublime’ and a view of the poet as a prophetic, even mantic figure, drawing on a transcendent-spiritual intuition and hence being able to speak with an inspired wisdom that went beyond mere rational cognition. This became enshrined in the poetics of the nascent Romantic movement and fed into the Hegelian notion of poet–prophets as world-historical figures articulating the consciousness of their national communities.

Tudor translators followed Plutarch, alleged tutor and advisor to the emperor Trajan, in presenting essays from his Moralia as counsel for governors, often in response to specific events. They also set out to reform the commonwealth by making Plutarch’s advice widely available through vernacular translation in print. Thomas Wyatt’s The quyete of mynde (1528) responds to the impending royal divorce. Thomas Elyot’s The educacion or bringinge up of children (1530) provides guidance to his sister but also promotes wider social and political reform. John Hales’s translation of ‘Advice on Health’ (1544) offers a remedy for the Lord Chancellor as well as the metaphorical body politic. Latin manuscript translations of ‘Superstition’ by John Cheke (1545 or 1546) and of ‘Talkativeness’ by John Christopherson (reign of Edward VI) respectively advocate and oppose further religious reform. Thomas Blundeville’s Three [morall] treatises (1561) presents his circle of Protestant humanist friends as counsellors to the newly acceded Queen Elizabeth.

The book’s second chapter offers some up-close treatments of negotiation between Latin and Greek in epic proems, at points of heuristic intersection between allusion, translation, and character-by-character transliteration. As the enterprise of Romanizing the Greek epic project gets under way, how does the beginning of a Latin epic negotiate its cross-linguistic turn? The chapter mobilizes the idea of poetic ‘transliteralism’, and does so partly by touching upon the world of digital text analysis, with its interest in harnessing translation technologies to achieve meaningful digital text-matching of Latin and Greek. Discussion moves from the very first verse in Roman epic tradition, the start of Livius Andronicus’ version of the Odyssey, to the opening (and closing) lines of the Ilias Latina, the probably Neronian epitome that served for the western Middle Ages as a make-do surrogate for the Iliad. In between, the ‘transliteral’ approach is applied to more familiar Homerizing setups by Virgil and by Statius; and the chapter also addresses a recurrent point of reference for the translingual poetics of Greek into Latin, the Phaenomena of Aratus.

Chapter 2 reviews Plath’s metaphorical employment of the witch-martyr figure within the political and religious framework of the Cold War. The chapter outlines Plath’s subversion of the religious vocabulary and themes in her poems, like ‘Lady Lazarus’, particularly its draft, and her parallelling doctors and priests in short stories, such as ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ to critique the rhetoric of the Cold War. The chapter gives evidence that Plath employs the female body as a site of modern political and medical institutional violence, seeking inspiration from the power imbalance of the early modern witch trials and Joan of Arc’s martyrdom. The close examination of Plath’s drafts of ‘Fever 103°’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ concludes the chapter on Plath’s Cold War poetics. It argues that the anticlerical and anti-authoritarian language of her poetry reimagines witch prosecutions, martyrdom, and inquisition in periods of political torture and nuclear warfare.

This chapter examines a literary critical ‘methodological moment’ from the middle of the nineteenth century to modernism. It argues that the re-emergence of the scientific method in this period was key to the normal scientific study of poetry. By returning to a series of forgotten critical debates about the relevance of the scientific method to the study of poetry, the chapter demonstrates how the nineteenth-century revival of method introduced a technical vocabulary into twentieth-century poetics, an epistemologically and politically charged discourse that centred on concepts of method, hypothesis and scientific law. The second half of this chapter goes on to examine published and unpublished poetry by George Oppen to show how he offered a new way of conceptualising the relationship between poetry and the scientific method. It suggests that Oppen turned to mathematics and set theory to create a new nominalist method that could create rather than explain. However, it is also argued that Oppen’s employment of the mathematical method actually ends up illustrating the epistemological power of poetic artifice: its ability to create the sights and sounds of the invisible but not inexistent multitude that Oppen’s poetry sought to bring into being.

Chapter 7 introduces the cultural and political context of post-war Britain in which the rise of English nationalism, immigration from the Commonwealth countries, Cold War anxieties, and the development of the Neo-Pagan Wicca religion contributed to the association of witchcraft with the dark other. The chapter reviews Plath’s short stories and poems written about a small English village community and beekeeping during the early 1960s, arguing that she engages with contemporary concerns of exclusionary politics and the racist and colonial rhetoric of witchcraft. Her bee metaphor interrogates the binary between self and otherness and ideas about magical and racialised power. The chapter concludes that in comparing the bees to diabolical flying women, Plath simultaneously challenges and reinforces the identification of the dark other with fearful magical power.

The Conclusion begins by setting the poetic bilingualisms treated in this book alongside the kinds of everyday bilingualism overheard on the streets of any city, from antiquity to the present day, in which two or more cultures meet, clash, and coalesce. There too, inequalities of language status will often be in play; but the inequalities explored here are negotiated in a distinctive way across time, and between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ literary languages or codes. Issues of education and of access to the so-called learned tongues are reviewed; attention is drawn to the sometimes oppressive effect of the word ‘the’ in monolithic master narratives of ‘the’ classical tradition. In retrospect, the book is argued to have been less about achieved classicism than about classicism as process, about a plurality of classical traditions generated anew by every cross-linguistic and transcultural event mobilized by every poet and every reader. Things end with a closural – but also open-ended – catalogue of some of the book’s recurrent questions, preoccupations, themes, and tropes.

Nineteenth-century history paintings were as formative as the historical novel for fixing our cultural image of the national past. Their style was conformist and even kitschy; but their visual evocation of bygone ages provided Romantic narratives of the national past with a visual, spectacular and, what is more, enduring iconography. Painting operated in tandem with the historical novel and with history writing. It helped translate historians’ knowledge production into cultural production, into a cultural repertoire and a visual iconography. And as the study of history evolved from Romantic nationalism towards a more factualist, archive-driven academic specialism, that Romantic iconography continued to dominate the popular imagination of what the national past had been like. History painting shaped, lastingly, how the nation’s past was envisaged, even as its status declined to that of a largely decorative art.

The treatment here of a major Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, takes its initial and final bearings not from any composition in Latin but from the poet’s English translations from Latin: his abandoned late career Aeneid, and early versions of lines from the Georgics in his student sketchbooks. In between, two mid-career lyric narratives are discussed. Throughout, the kind of verbal push-and-pull that is a common element in all this book’s studies finds a new immediacy through privileged access to the ebb and flow of Wordsworth’s transactions with the classical in his own successive redrafts and re-edits, and in the commentatorial interventions of his friends and family (including Coleridge’s minute and unsparing marginalia on the attempted Aeneid). The middle of the chapter explores the Laodamia, whose up-close Virgilianism is obsessively worked and reworked over a thirty-year period, and then the Dion, another oddly framed lyric narrative that originates in Plutarch as an exemplary Greek ‘life’ parallel to that of the Roman Brutus. Trace elements of Wordsworth’s distinctively autobiographical poetic of lake and landscape are everywhere in play, sometimes unexpectedly.

The chapter draws attention to the extreme unspeakability of incest in children's literature and the rarity of texts either literally or symbolically dealing with the topic. It analyses Crew and Scott’s picture story book, In My Father’s Room (2000), in terms of the Bluebeard fairy tale, with close attention to ways of seeing and being seen. This disturbing text (marketed as a book for young children) plays a father’s love for his daughter, manifested in his secret story-writing, against the Bluebeard story of secrecy, multiple sexual partners and murder. The boundaries of the unspeakable in literature for children have changed markedly in the post-war era, particularly in terms of problem novels for a young adult readership; but picture story books for younger readers remain almost uniformly committed to a depiction of the loving nuclear family with mother, father and child or children, where childhood naughtiness is the worst evil that can be encountered; incestuous behaviours by a father are barely mentionable and the incestuous mother unthinkable.