Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome have fallen prey to Matthew Arnold’s 1861 dismissive and damning assessment: “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all.” Arnold’s dismissal appears in his own cultural translation project – his lectures on translating Homer argue against using ballad meters as the vehicle for popularizing Homer’s greatness – and Arnold’s influential views have effectively removed Macaulay’s poems and their paratextual materials from the literary map of the nineteenth century. This essay explores what is at stake in such a critical erasure and shows why and how these erasures have shaped our contemporary understanding of poetic form.

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome have fallen prey to Matthew Arnold’s 1861 dismissive and damning assessment: “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all. Arnold’s dismissal appears in his own cultural translation project – his lectures on translating Homer argue against using ballad meters as the vehicle for popularizing Homer’s greatness – and Arnold’s influential views have effectively removed Macaulay’s poems and their paratextual materials from the literary map of the nineteenth century. This essay explores what is at stake in such a critical erasure and shows why and how these erasures have shaped our contemporary understanding of poetic form.