"Virgil's influence on English literature has been enormous. He was Edmund Spenser's constant inspiration for the fanciful beauty of The Faerie Queene. The Aeneid was the model for John Milton's Paradise Lost not only in epic structure and machinery but also in style and diction. In the English Augustan age, John Dryden and countless others held that Virgil's poetry had reached the ultimate perfection of form and ethical content. There was some reaction against him in the Romantic period, but the Victorians, such as Matthew Arnold and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, rediscovered in full measure that sensitivity and pathos that the Romantics had complained that Virgil lacked."
January 1, 1970