The mark of success in a poet's career, writes David Slavitt, was an epic that might stand on the shelf alongside Virgil's. But how was a poet like Ovid, with a more intimate, livelier, funnier and more self-mocking sensibility, to attempt such a thing? The epic form was not, I think, immediately congenital, and my guess is that Ovid recognized this himself. Accordingly, he transformed the epic, playing against its grain a lot of the time, and escaping its severe organizational and thematic demands by transforming it into something altogether different. The first metamorphosis, then, is of...
The mark of success in a poet's career, writes David Slavitt, was an epic that might stand on the shelf alongside Virgil's. But how was a poet like Ov...
