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Gordon Braden, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, will give the Clark Lectures 2025 on the theme of Sappho: A New Look Back.
Gordon Braden has long been recognised as a preeminent scholar and critic of English Renaissance Literature.
His work is particularly associated with the role of classical literature in the making of English poetry and drama, its impact on writers of varying stature from Arthur Golding and Robert Herrick to Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.
He is also interested in the history and activity of translation from the classics. He has also been much concerned with the ‘idea of the Renaissance’, the title of a co-authored book (1991), and a central concept in two of his monographs, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999), recently complemented by Petrarchan Love and the English Renaissance (2022).
He taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where he was Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English until his retirement in 2014.
Below Professor Braden answers a Q&A about his research interests and his lectures.
Why Sappho: A New Look Back?
The answer to this question is tied up with the answer to the last one; to some extent these lectures are that unwritten book for me, which these Clark Lectures has prompted me to have a go at. I will talk about the personal dimension in my first lecture. I first studied classical Greek in high school in Houston, Texas (!), and it was a 4-line fragment of Sappho’s that gave me my first genuine literary thrill with anything in a foreign language.
I started graduate school in Classics but ended up getting a PhD in English and teaching in an English department for 39 years. But Classics generally and Sappho in particular (in a manner of speaking, my high school sweetheart) have always felt like unfinished business. The look back is both personal (sometimes eccentrically so; on a number of the usual topics connected with Sappho I simply have nothing to say) and professional.
My response to her poetry now has the context of all that later literature, especially love poetry, that I’ve been thinking and writing about; the response to her generally has gained immensely in the last few decades from a shifting attitude toward homosexuality, and has also acquired more texts to read and think about.
Also, Camillo Neri’s huge new edition conveniently gathers in one place a great trove of up-to-date information and material that would otherwise pose an impossible challenge for someone at my age who didn’t spend a professional lifetime in a Classics department. In other words, a good time for a look back and, I hope, a fresh take.
Are you happy with the way ‘the Renaissance’ has given way to ‘the Early Modern period’?
When this distinction was first advanced in a polemical way a few decades back, there was a sense that the matter was a fraught one and quite a lot hinged on it. I don’t think it’s turned out that way. In my own writing I find myself using both terms, sometimes because one seems more appropriate in the immediate context, but sometimes just for variety’s sake. I don’t think the distinction is really all that firm; Burckhardt, usually associated (disapprovingly these days) with renaissance, was emphatic that renaissance man was “the first-born among the sons of modern Europe.”
If you could take the work of one classical writer to the proverbial desert island, what would it be and why?
Plutarch. He’s got some great stories, his judgments of people are nuanced and humane, you never know what he’s going to talk about or what he’s going to say, sometimes he’s very funny. His discussion of what it’s like to (try to) listen to a lecture is still right on target. And there’s an awful lot of him to read; I never have made it to the end of the Moralia.
It’s sometimes said that literary critics all have one unwritten book in them. Do you?
See first question.
The four lectures begin at 5pm in the Old Combination Room, Great Court, Trinity College (ask for directions from the Great Gate Porters’ Lodge)
Monday 3 March: The Violet Hour
Thursday 6 March: All Shook Up