Product Description

The debts that English poetry owes to the Classics are massive and various. But they have been richly repaid by the astonishingly inventive tradition of translation to which some of the greatest poets in the English language have contributed, including Chaucer and Jonson, Dryden and Pope, Tennyson and Ezra Pound This anthology presents the wealth of this living tradition as it has never been seen before, ranging from King Alfred to contemporary poets such as Ted Hughes, and from North America to Ireland and Scotland. It offers a vast array of responses to the song, verse, and drama of ancient Greece and Rome, and to poets themselves as varied as Homer, Sappho, and Euripides; Virgil, Ovid, and Juvenal. Organized by classical author and text, it runs from the epics of Homer to the late antique world where Greek and Latin writing both faced an emerging Christian culture, and juxtaposes English versions, sometimes of the same passage or poem, to dramatize the endless re-animation of one great poetic tradition in and through another.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #657795 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 656 pages

Review
"An amazing and interesting body of work."--School Library Journal
"Provides both a wealth of classical verse and a delight through variations in translation....This once-in-a-generation scholarly work should be acquired by both public and academic libraries."--Choice
"Lovers of the classics and English poetry will happily lose themselves in this book for hours on end."--Booklist
"A new anthology of classical verse in translation is greatly to be welcomed. This Oxford book will deservedly attract many superlatives...this handsome volume will be much to read and enjoyed but not bettered for years to come. A veritable feast."--The Anglo-Hellenic Review
"This anthology is proof that interest in the classical tradition has survived a period of radical scepticism...it is an anthology for the kind of people who normally despise anthologies."--Church Times

About the Author
Adrian Poole is University Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Jeremy Maule is Newton Trust Assistant Lecturer in English, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.