This book and CD enables students to read Latin poetry aloud with confidence.

Embracing the whole two-thousand-year corpus of Latin poetry, this book seeks to stimulate interest in the neglected art of reading aloud. It establishes a practical working pronunciation for Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Latin by means of a detailed analysis of the essential known facts, and it develops and explains a clear and practical system of phonetic notation, based upon the International Phonetic Alphabet. A substantial number of poems and extracts from all periods is offered for practice. Issues relevant to both quantitative and rhythmical prosody are fully discussed and translation notes are supplied to aid the student. Each poem is fully transcribed into phonetics and is accompanied by an English verse translation, whose main purpose is to reveal something of the literary quality of the verse. Two accompanying CDs aid pronunciation by giving the practice words found in the pronunciation sections and offering a complete reading of the poems.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... RHYTHMICAL. ELEMENTS Syllables Rhythm as involved in poetry has been considered in the foregoing pages along general lines, but from this point onward the subject will be restricted to the single field of Latin. It is now in order to develop somewhat more fully a phase of the subject already touched upon, namely, the part played by syllables. The existence of syllables rests upon a natural basis. The voice can not convey a succession of thoughts except by being varied into different sounds, and these can not be sufficiently numerous and distinguishable for our needs except by the introduction of such as break or hinder the current of breath, producing a division into syllables. The poet's recognition and selection of syllables for the purposes of versification, far from being a highly artificial process, is mainly subconscious. His standard and criterion are not the dictionary, nor words sounded separately, but audible, fluent speech. And so it not infrequently happens that when one word is merged into another, the result is a syllable that embraces parts of two words. To read Latin poetry well, one must bring out distinctly the sound properties of the syllables, some of these properties being inherent in the separate syllables, some resulting from the effect one syllable has upon another. 6What, in detail, are these properties? A syllable comprises a vowel alone, a diphthong alone, or either in close union with one or more consonants. Latin vowels, according to the ancients, fell into three classes: (1) those of brief duration and therefore considered short, (2) those more extended in time and therefore considered long, and (3) those occurring in closely knit pairs, called diphthongs, the same being long. Consonants seemed to affect the...

Love Poetry Readings for Comprehension and Review This reader introduces intermediate Latin students to Catullus, Horace, and Ovid. It offers a transition to reading these authors by presenting slightly modified versions of poems before the students read the authentic Latin verse as review. Vocabulary, reading helps, grammar reviews with exercises, and discussion questions are included, as well as sections on metrics, poetic devices and a complete glossary.

This is a book about poetry, language, and classical antiquity, and explains to the reader with little or no Latin how the language works as a unique vehicle for poetic expression. Fitzgerald guides the reader through samples of Latin poetry to give a sense of how the individual poems feel in Latin and what makes Latin poetry worth reading.