UNIQUE STAMPS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18796, 7 February 1931, Page 9

UNIQUE STAMPS

HONOUR FOR POETS. Two thousand years ago the poet Virgil was bom, the great exponent of the aims and ideals of the Augustan Age, in whose memory Italy has Issued ten stamps to celebrate the second millenary. Each stamp illustrates an incident or passage from the “ACneid," “Bucolics,” or “Georgies,” and has a familiar quoatation in the original Latin. The fifteen centesimi stamp (according to a description in the “Christian Science Monitor”) shows Eleno greeting /Eneas on his arrival at the new Troy. The next value depicts a Roman father and son watching the departure of a Legion toward the coast, and the quotation is very apt: “To rule the subject peoples with imperial sway, be that your care, O Roman!” (.ffineid VI., 851).

.ffineas feasting in the shade of Albunea forms the subject of the 25 centesimi stamp with a passage from “ASneid VII.” (120.122).

The 30 centesimi stamp illustrates an allegory: it shows a mother and her children surrounded by the kindly fruits of the earth, and has an extract from the “Georgies” (H. 174).

One stamp of the series has been set aside for aerial postage, and its accompanying quotation is one of the many signs of Virgil’s prophetic vision. The subject is an old man watching the flight of an eagle, and the inscription Is from ASneid I.” (278): “For them I assign limits neither to the extent nor the duration of their Empire.” The vignettes are executed in the style of mural paintings by the Italian artist Dr. Corrado Mezzana, and are reproduced in photogravure. They are very much finer than the three stamps

Italy previously dedicated to another famous son, the poet Dante. Spain and Portugal have vied with each other in producing stamps worthy of their literary sons, but perhaps the most beautiful stamps of this kind were those issued in Bulgaria in 1920 to celebrate the jubilee of their greatest poet, Vazoff. France gave a rather insignificant blue 7 centime stamp as a tribute to her “Prince of Poets,” Pierre de Ronsard, and Poland, in 1927, Issued several stamps in honour of her patriot and poet Slowacki. Slowacki, who lived between 1809 and 1849, resided in Paris from the year 1831, and his work bears the impress of Byron and Victor Hugo.

The only English poet who has found a niche in the Poets’ Corner in philately is Byron, to whom Greece dedicated a stamp on the occasion of the centenary of his death.