SOURCE: Pucci, Joseph. “Alcuin's Cell Poem: A Virgilian Reappraisal.” Latomus: Revue D'Études Latines 49, no. 4 (October-December 1990): 839-49.

In the following essay, Pucci analyzes Alcuin's use of Virgilian pastoral language.

The artistic, generic, and stylistic features of Alcuin's carmen 23 (MGH [Monumenta Germaniae Historica]), commonly called the cell poem, are novel, marking an advance on Merovingian poetics¹, and symbolizing an invigoration of poetry-writing after several centuries of relative abandonment. Such features have inspired several generations of scholars at once to praise the poem and to agree upon the unities and assymetries involved in its creation². Alcuin combines in this poem an array of literary modes that in other circumstances might well collapse of their own weight. Generically, he writes an elegy in mature couplets but his topic is almost entirely pastoral. Beyond the mere conflation of form to content is the addition of Virgilian pastoral language that is set side...