..". Humphries has rendered (Ovid's) love poetry with conspicuous success into English which is neither obtrusively colloquial nor awkwardly antique." --Virginia Quarterly Review

..". gives us all sixteen of the satires in the tough, slashing manner of the original, unheard in Dryden and the few others who tried it." Saturday Review

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..". captures] the relentless urgency of Lucretius didacticism, his passionate conviction and proselytizing fervour. The Classical Review

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Rolfe Humphries (18941969), in addition to being an outstanding poet, left an impressive trail as a translator, teacher, critic, and editor. But, as Richard Gillman maintains in his introduction, poetry was the driving force behind these other special skills and interests. Humphries was, Gillman writes, an example of "the total poet. . . . If ever there were poets who did in fact breathe their art, he was one of them."

These letters for the first time illumine Humphries and his achievements. We see him as the mentor to younger poets, including Theodore Roethke, providing rare glimpses of...