Excerpt from Yale Book of American Verse A statement of the sort just made is based, in truth, not only upon the assumption that the editor's acquaintance with the poetical literature of our race is absolutely complete, but that his judgment of the comparative excellence of the pieces composing it is absolutely perfect. No one would be willing to con cede the latter qualification and few the former. Every collection of poems must inevitably reflect to a great extent the limitation of the compiler's knowl edge. Many pieces which he would have been glad to include, had he been aware of their existence, are likely to have escaped his observation. But were there no lack of knowledge, the choice he makes will be certain to reflect the nature of his literary sym pathics, and even more the limitations of his literary taste; at all events its distinctive character. There are certain poems which it is always easy to select. Upon them the consent of the ages has already set the stamp of approval. Against this verdict of suc cessive generations there may be protest upon the part of the individual; but from it there can be no valid appeal. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Of all the poets of ancient Rome Ovid had perhaps the most influence on the art and literature of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Even today he is probably the most accessible of all classical poets to the non-specialist, both in his subject matter and in his style. Ovid is no less fascinated than we are by the human psyche and by the ways men and women relate to each other, and many of his views on these questions seem centuries ahead of his time. Ovid’s interest in narrative technique is so much like ours that modern critical terms such as “reader-response” could have been coined for his experiments with story telling. In the creation of different personae and points of view his ingenuity is endless. For the Amores he invented a posing poet-lover; for the Art of Love, his narrator is a cynical professor of seduction who is convinced, quite wrongly, that he has love down to a science. In the Heroides, a series of verse-letters from the famous women of legend to their lovers, he brilliantly recreated great moments of heroic mythology from the feminine point of view. The longest and most enchanting of his works, the Metamorphoses, an epic-length poem on the infinite changes of mythology and history, afforded him the richest opportunities of all to experiment with narrative techniques. In this book Sara Mack introduces Ovid to the general reader. After considering Ovid’s modernity, Mack surveys his poetry chronologically. Next she examines his most influential poems: the Amores, Heroides, Art of Love, and Metamorphoses. Finally she explores Ovidian wit, concluding with a look at Ovid’s influence on the arts.

Study of classical Greek poet and the ode form in Western tradition. Assumes no knowledge of specialist literature and includes translations.

During a long and distinguished career, John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1996) brought about a new understanding and appreciation of the American landscape. Hailed in 1995 by New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp as 'America’s greatest living writer on the forces that have shaped the land this nation occupies,' Jackson founded Landscape Magazine in 1951, taught at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, and wrote nearly 200 essays and reviews. This appealing anthology of his most important writings on the American landscape, illustrated with his own sketches and photographs, brings together Jackson’s most famous essays, significant but less well known writings, and articles that were originally published unsigned or under various pseudonyms. Jackson also completed a new essay for this volume, 'Places for Fun and Games,' a few months before his death. Focusing not on nature but on landscape - land shaped by human presence - Jackson insists in his writings that the workaday world gives form to the essential American landscape. In the everyday places of the countryside and city, he discerns texts capable of revealing important truths about society and culture, present and past. For this collection Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz provides an introduction that discusses the larger body of Jackson’s writing and locates each of the selected essays within his oeuvre. She also includes a complete bibliography of Jackson’s writings.

A powerful and poignant translation of Vergil's epic poem, newly equipped with introduction and notes "Ruden set the bar for Aeneid translations in 2008, and has raised it now with this revision. I am confident it will be a long time before a translator exceeds the standard that she has set."--A. M. Juster, Athenaeum Review This is a substantial revision of Sarah Ruden's celebrated 2008 translation of Vergil's Aeneid, which was acclaimed by Garry Wills as "the first translation since Dryden's that can be read as a great English poem in itself." Ruden's line-for-line translation in iambic pentameter is an astonishing feat, unique among modern translations. Her revisions to the translation render the poetry more spare and muscular than her previous version and capture even more closely the essence of Vergil's poem, which pits national destiny against the fates of individuals, and which resonates deeply in our own time. This distinguished translation, now equipped with introduction, notes, and glossary by leading Vergil scholar Susanna Braund, allows modern readers to experience for themselves the timeless power of Vergil's masterpiece.