LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Virgil: Poets
built 658 days ago
Although his influence in the canon of poetry is uncontestable and he enjoyed the benefits of Emperor Augustus's patronage, Virgil was not a prolific writer. His body of work consists of the ten Eclogues (or Bucolics), which took him approximately five years to write, the four Georgics, which took seven years, and the Aeneid, which he worked on for eleven years and still considered unfinished at the time of his death. The Eclogues generally focus on the daily lives of shepherds and shepherdesses, and they take place in idyllic country settings. The Bucolics center on agricultural life and the beauty of living in the company of nature.
Source:
Virgil's true and yet idealizing interpretation of the imperial idea of Rome is the basis of the greatness of the Aeneid as a representative poem. It is on this representative character and on the excellence of its artistic execution that the claim of the Aeneid to rank as one of the great poems of the world mainly rests. The inferiority of the poem to the Iliad and the Odyssey as a direct representation of human life is so unquestionable that we are in danger of underrating the real though secondary interest which the poem possesses as an imitative epic of human action, manners and character. In the first place it should be remarked that the action is chosen not only as suited to embody the idea of Rome, but as having a peculiar nobleness and dignity of its own. It brings before us the spectacle of the destruction of the city of greatest name in poetry or legend, of the foundation of the imperial city of the western seas, in which Rome had encountered her most powerful antagonist in her long struggle for supremacy, and that of the first rude settlement on the hills of Rome itself. The scenes through which the action is carried are familiar, yet full of great memories and associations - Troy and its neighbourhood, the seas and islands of Greece, the coasts of Epirus, familiar to all travellers between Italy and the East, Sicily, the site of Carthage, Campania, Latium, the Tiber, and all the country within sight of Rome.
Source:
Virgil received his earliest education at five years old. He later went to Rome to study rhetoric, medicine, and astronomy, which he soon abandoned for philosophy. In this period, while Virgil was in the school of Siro the Epicurean, he began writing poetry.
Source:
In the medieval period, Virgil was considered a wizard and, at the same time, a herald of Christianity, for his Eclogue 4 prophesied the birth of a boy in terms reminiscent of Christ's nativity. The poem may refer to the pregnancy of Octavians wife Scribonia, who in fact gave birth to a girl. Dante made Virgil his guide in his Divine Comedy. He is still considered the greatest of the Latin poets.
Source:
Virgil spent about ten years writing this great epic. The story itself is complete, but he had not finished polishing the poetic style in which it was written. While making his way to Athens, he met Augustus who was returning to Rome from the East. Virgil decided to return with Augustus. While he was getting to a nearby town of Megera, he got sick under the blazing sun. He was put ashore at Brindisi; his condition became more serious and within a few days, Virgil died.
Source:
Virgil accompanied the Emperor to Megara and then to Italy. The journey turned out to be fatal and the poet died in 19 B.C of a fever in contracted on his visit to Greece. It is said that the poet had instructed his executor Varius to destroy The Aeneid, but Augustus ordered Varius to ignore this request, and the poem was published.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Poets