The Aeneid, Imagination, and Literary Reflection
Written by Nicki Johnston
I attended the Well-Read Mom “Awaken Your Heart” conference in Milwaukee earlier this month. There were so many beautiful things about the weekend, not the least of which was being with many other like-minded women who were reading the same thing. The last time I was able to attend a WRM conference was just after we had read The Violent Bear It Away for the Year of the Family, and much of the conversations at the conference included praise or laments for Flannery O’Connor. Similarly, during this conference, many conversations were about The Aeneid. Being right in the thick of this book myself, I couldn’t help but connect much of what I heard from the speakers to Virgil’s poem.
It was at the conference that I first learned about Pope Francis’s letter “On the Role of Literature in Formation”. In this letter, Pope Francis quotes the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges about the importance of entering “into direct contact with literature, to immerse oneself in the living text in front of us” even if at first one “may understand very little of what they are reading”. This is certainly true when it comes to The Aeneid.
In one of her two keynote talks at the conference, Dr. Holly Ordway spoke about “Literature and Meaning-Making” and the role that the imagination plays in our ability to make meaning when we read. While reason is the organ of truth, she told us, the imagination is the organ of meaning. “Meaning precedes judgment, which precedes response.” And so, even though we’re reading an English translation of Virgil’s work, it can still feel like we’re reading a foreign language. Without a background in the Roman gods and goddesses or an understanding of Roman history, our imaginations might fail to make the connections necessary to follow the story. Thankfully, WRM offers us many resources in the reading companion, including synopses of each book and suggestions for retellings that can help us better follow the plot.
And yet, these retellings are not enough. In another talk, Dr. Ordway spoke about the reader’s duty of “intellectual hospitality,” which requires that we receive a work on its own terms. For The Aeneid, this includes, among other things, acknowledging that it was written before Christ and that it is an epic poem. Reading prose retelling might give us a sense of the story, but we would miss out by not encountering it as a poem.
In “Poetry as Enchantment,” Dana Gioia writes, “An essential part of poetry’s power has little connection to conceptual understanding. Poetry proffers some mysteries that lie beyond paraphrase.” In writing about Blake’s “The Tyger”—vastly different from Virgil’s epic, to be sure, but applicable nonetheless—he says that “Listeners love the poem as a verbal tune or magic spell that summons powerful images and awakens deep emotions. They respond with pleasure and exhilaration to the experience the poem affords”.
I experienced this spell-casting firsthand as I read The Aeneid this fall. While I did not intend to read it aloud to my children, I did find it helpful to read it aloud to myself so that I could hear the musicality of the meter of Sarah Ruden’s translation. As I read aloud, my children would quietly appear at my feet or on the edge of the couch, drawn by the lure of their Mama’s voice reciting beautiful words. I witnessed what Gioia calls “the efficacy of the performance in casting a spell of heightened attention over the audience” as my boys experienced The Aeneid as it was originally intended.
Their example of humility and wonder recalls how I tried to approach T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets last year. It’s easy for those of us without formal training in literature to fear that we are incapable of understanding poetry. Yet, Gioia reminds us that “the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive.”
To this end, Joshua Hren, in another talk at the WRM conference, compared a great work of literature to a cathedral. He encouraged us to respond to it as we ought: with awe. This idea struck me in a particular way when I attended Sunday Mass at the Basilica of Saint Josaphat the day after the conference on my way to the airport to fly home. The grandeur and beauty of this church did, indeed, inspire awe in me as I considered the images of the saints within—the extraordinary men and women, in particular Saint Francis (knowing that we would next be reading his biography), but also the artists who created these statues and stained-glass windows.
This interplay of artist and saint reminded me of something Dana Gioia said in response to an audience question during his opening keynote at the “Ever Ancient, Ever New” conference on Catholic Imagination at Notre Dame this fall. When asked, “What’s one way that Catholic poetry, writing, and art can sanctify something about our culture?” Gioia responds, “The church is reformed and revitalized by not by its institutions but by its saints.” There is a role for the poet, Gioia says—specifically, “to clarify, to remember, to cherish”—but “we [artists] take second place to the saints.”
After an inspiring weekend contemplating the power of literature, I look forward to turning next to the saints, particularly to Saint Francis in Elizabeth Goudge’s My God and My All.
About Nicki Johnston
Nicki Johnston is a home educator, a CGS catechist, an avid reader and an amateur naturalist. She lives in Kansas with her husband, Graham, and their four young sons.
About Well-Read Mom
In Well-Read Mom, women read more and read well. Our hope is to deepen the awareness of meaning hidden in each woman’s daily life. We long to elevate the cultural conversation and revitalize reading literature from books. If you would like us to help you select worthy reading material, we invite you to join and read along. We are better together! For information on how to start or join a Well-Read Mom group visit our website wellreadmom.com
