Ed Simon at Poetry Magazine:
“An exile,” says Aeneas in The Aeneid, “I took to sea with my men, my son, and the great gods of my country and home.” An epic of nation-building, Virgil’s poem turns on that classical trope of translatio studii et imperii: the belief that not only power but knowledge itself migrates from culture to culture, so that ever westward runs the course of civilization. “If life lasts, I’ll be the first to return to my country, / bringing the Muses with me,” Virgil bragged, signaling a faith that poetry and inspiration were planted in western soil by men such as himself.
Nearly sixteen hundred years later, another displaced people arrived on western shores. Unlike Virgil’s imagined Trojans, however, these travelers did not cross the sea as founders but as captives. They were, in the words of Joshua Bennett, the “newest iteration of human / forged in a land already / marked by conflagration and blood,” as he writes in the poem “St. Paul’s Parish, South Carolina” from his remarkable new collection We (The People of the United States). Rome itself had been a composite—Latins, Greeks, Etruscans, Sabellians, and, if Virgil is to be believed, Trojans. America, too, was composed from many nations, though its founding mixture included the Igbo, the Wolof, and the Yoruba.
more here.
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