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.
Industry Reviews
`This splendid and well-presented anthology fills a depressing gap. The attraction and value of this work is its layout - grouping under authors with their dates and snippets on their history or locations. Those interested in the finer aspects of poetry have delights in store comparing rhyming and the labyrinth of changing metrication. This work would be a valuable asset to any library and a jewel in the private collection. It is moderately priced for the
wealth it contains.'
Sybil Owen, Oxford Times
`an indispensable guide ... Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule have gathered together a stunning selection of ancient poetry ... turned into English by almost 300 "diverse hands" ... as this marvellous collection repeatedly shows, the classical tradition produces some very surprising bedfellows.'
Mary Beard, The Standard
`it is for ordinary readers...that I take this compilation to be primarily intended, and for them the Oxford book is...inviting...there is an easy suggestion of the accessibility of the Greeks and the Romans and a demonstration of the ways in which they have continued to speak in a variety of accents and dictions to men and women over the recent centuries.'
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 7.3
`A new anthology of classical verse in translation is greatly to be welcomed. This Oxford book will deservedly attract many superlatives, biggest, most scholarly, broadest in chronological range, most representativce, best organised. It is all of these ... this handsome volume will be much read and enjoyed but not bettered for years to come. A veritable feast.'
David Holton, The Anglo-Hellenic Review, No. 13, Spring 1996
`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.'
Alison Shell, Church Times
`scintillating'
Paul Cartledge, New Statesman & Society
`presents the best from the Graeco-Roman hit parade, the golden and (in the case of post-Augustan Latin, silver) oldies from noble epic to humble inscription ... this volume is also a chrestomathy of genuinely good English verse ... There are many delights ... This splendid compendium refutes Robert Frost's famous dictum that poetry is "that which is lost in translation". It is, in short, a book for all seasons.'
Times Literary Supplement
`Assembling an unprecedentedly substantial and varied anthology of, as it were, the classical component of English neoclassical verse, and showing how easy it is to pick out of even as busy a crowd as this one, seem to me the core achievements of the current volume.'
Gordon Braden, University of Virginia
`This valuable anthology presents classical Greek and Latin verse from Homer to Boethius in a extraordinary variety of translations...One could write much of the history of English poetry with this volume as a starting point, and it is easy to envisage it providing material for imaginative seminars...The scope of this anthology is admirable, and is the result of wide but unobtrusive research...It would make an ideal present for the student of English or of
Classics, but at the same time no experienced scholar in either subject will fail to be surprised, educated and stimulated by it.'
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