The Call of Classical Literature in the Romantic Age

K. P. Van Anglen is Senior Lecturer on English, retired, at Boston University. He is author of The New England Milton (1993), co-editor of Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (2008), and editor of the Translations volume (1986) in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, which includes Thoreau's English versions of plays traditionally ascribed to Aeschylus, and his renderings of parts of Pindar's Odes and the Anacreontea. Van Anglen edited "Simplify, Simplify" and Other Quotations from Henry David Thoreau (1996). He recently coedited Thoreau at Two Hundred: Essays and Reassessments, essays commissioned by the Thoreau Society to celebrate the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth. James Engell is Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He has spent his career teaching at Harvard University where he has chaired the Departments of English and of Comparative Literature as well as the Degree Program in History & Literature. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, author of four books and numerous articles, as well as a contributor to and editor of nine volumes, his interests embrace the Enlightenment and Romanticism, rhetoric, and environmental issues. He studied classical literature with Glen Bowersock and Wendell Clausen and contributed the entry for Wordsworth to The Virgil Encyclopedia.