In Britain there was a tendency to grant Virgil honorary citizenship. In the introduction to his turn of the century translation for the Everyman edition, T. F. Royds argued that "just as the Latin poet had his pedigree, Virgil is here an adopted English poet, and his many translators have made for him an English pedigree too".Eclogues and Georgics, J. M. Dent & Sons, London 1907, p. xiv So too, living in Devon as World War II progressed, C. Day Lewis saw his own translation as making a patriotic statement. As he commented later: "More and more I was buoyed up by a feeling that England was speaking to me through Virgil, and that the Virgil of the Georgics was speaking to me through the English farmers and labourers with whom I consorted."Albert Gelpi, Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis, OUP 1998, pp.82 – 90 Among a multiplicity of earlier translations, his new version would be justified by avoiding "that peculiar kind of Latin-derived pidgin-English which infects the style of so many classical scholars" and making its appeal instead through an approachable, down-to-earth idiom.C. Day Lewis, The Georgics of Virgil, Jonathan Cape 1940, pp.7-8
