John Dryden called Virgil's Georgics, written between 37 and 30 B.C.E., "the best poem by the best poet." The poem, newly translated by the poet and translator David Ferry, is one of the great songs, maybe the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in difficult--and beautiful--circumstances, and in the context of all we share in nature. The Georgics celebrates the crops, trees, and animals, and, above all, the human beings who care for them. It takes the form of teaching about this care: the tilling of fields, the tending of vines, the raising of the cattle and the bees. There's joy in the detail of Virgil's descriptions of work well done, and ecstatic joy in his praise of the very life of things, and passionate commiseration too, because of the vulnerability of men and all other creatures, with all they have to contend with: storms, and plagues, and wars, and all mischance. As Rosanna Warren noted about Ferry's work in The Threepenny Review, "We finally have an English Horace whose rhythmical subtlety and variety do justice to the Latin poet's own inventiveness, in which emotion rises from the motion of the verse . . . To sense the achievement, one has to read the collection as a whole . . . and they can take one's breath away even as they continue breathing." This ebook edition includes only the English language translation of the Georgics.

"Virgil and the Mountain Cat, David Lau's first book of poems, evokes the shattering of Western civilization (not its collapse, but the tense, apprehensive moment before the cracked vessel falls apart). What commanded trust now provokes a nihilistic retaliatory mischief-making poetic language, in which the only redemptive element, if there is one, is what Alain Badiou calls the 'engine' of excess in the greatest 20th century art, excess of the kind that allows for change, a revolution. Lau's high-voltage language is a measure of the passion of (and for) belief that has been lost. Lau is a remarkable young poet."—Calvin Bedient, author of Candy Necklace "It's after the end of the world, and David Lau is our last first poet of the future past. When words have nowhere left to go, they need a new Virgil to guide them sideways in time, to where they can become ferociously fractal as the cry of a mountain cat. The microtonal resistances of Lau's language both remove and remotivate meaning: what the poet 'saw was raw war.' David Lau's work enacts a great refusal that lights fuses beneath the psycho-political dome."—Andrew Joron, author of The Sound Mirror "The scary accomplishment of Virgil and the Mountain Cat is to remind a reader that poetry has the capacity to disturb, rather than calm, one's nervous system. Lau's poems are knowing and proficient and care nothing for your feelings. Punk in its spirit, sure to prove alienating to most readers over thirty, and spoken from a place deep 'inside the annotations,' this book is an unforgiving glimpse of the horizonless present."—Mark Levine, author of The Wilds

In this classic study, Brooks Otis presents Virgil as a radically different poet from any of his Greek or Roman predecessors. Virgil molded the ancient epic tradition to his own Roman contemporary aims and succeeded in making mythical and legendary figures meaningful to a sophisticated, unmythical age. Otis begins and ends his study with the Aeneid and includes chapters on the Bucolics and the Georgics. A new foreword by Ward W. Briggs, Jr., places Otis’s groundbreaking achievement in the context of past and present Virgilian scholarship.

"For T. S. Eliot, Virgil was not merely one of the great masters but 'our classic, the classic of all Europe'. Perhaps no other writer has generated a longer and larger tradition of commentary, translation and imitation." "From Chaucer to W. H. Auden and Robert Lowell, Virgil is a defining presence in English poetry. The Eclogues and Georgics inspired the pastorals of Spenser, Milton and Pope; the Aeneid's pathos, spiritual insights and long-suffering hero - who struggles with doubt, despair and the loss of everything he loves to found the Roman race - made it the model epic. Dryden's complete Virgil in heroic couplets sums up the supersedes his predecessors, yet later translators include Wordsworth, William Morris, Robert Bridges and Cecil Day Lewis. This selection consists largely of extracts from straight translations, along with a number of pieces illustrating Virgil's influence; celebrated episodes like the death of Dido and Aeneas's descent into the underworld appear in several different versions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.