A Modern Myth In Classical Dress: The Titanic Disaster in Contemporary Latin Verse

The Titanic captured the imagination of poets and artists from a wide range of disciplines as soon as news of the disaster reached the mainland. As such, the story was rapidly represented as a modern myth, fusing fact with fiction and giving rise to (often ideologically) conflicting narratives as to what exactly happened aboard the ill-fated ship that night and which lessons should be drawn from it. As the tale of a ‘Titan’s’ technological hubris, the modern tragedy also evoked a sense of classical mythology, yet surprisingly, this theme was hardly ever fully exploited in contemporary English poetry. It was, however, in contemporary Latin poetry. Although the active use of Latin had become an increasingly marginal phenomenon from the eighteenth century onward, Latin poetry in particular was going through a remarkable revival at the time of the Titanic disaster, which was mainly fuelled by the international success of one poetry competition in particular, the Certamen Hoeufftianum. With its propensity to read current events in ancient structures, Neo-Latin poetry thrived in this competition, which was continually flooded by submissions on modern subjects in classical verse. The Titanic disaster was no exception. Building on Sacré 1999, which predates the recent rediscovery of the rich Hoeufftianum archives, this article offers a contextualised overview of all known Latin Titanica, dating both from the incident’s immediate aftermath and from subsequent waves of interest, while paying particular attention to the way in which these Latin poets mapped modernity onto an ancient template.status: Published onlin