Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> Ancient & Classical

• Features a general introduction, individual prefaces to each play, chronology, notes, bibliography, and glossary

To the consternation of his more academic admirers, who believed Latin to be the only proper language for dignified verse, Dante wrote his Comedy in colloquial Italian, wanting it to be a poem for the common reader. Taking two threads of a story that everybody knew and loved - the story of a vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and the story of the lover who has to brave the Underworld to find his lost lady - he combined them into a great allegory of the soul's search for God. He made it swift, exciting and topical, lavishing upon it...

• Features a general introduction, individual prefaces to each play, chronology, notes, bibliography, and glossary

This vigorous translation of Inferno preserves Dante's simple, natural style, and captures the swift movement of the original Italian verse. Mark Musa's blank verse rendition of the poet's journey through the circles of hell recreates for the modern reader the rich meanings that Dante's poem had for his contemporaries. Musa's introduction and commentaries on each of the cantos brilliantly illuminate the text.

For more than...

A towering figure of the Renaissance, Luis de Gongora pioneered poetic forms so radically different from the dominant aesthetic of his time that he was derided as "the Prince of Darkness." The Solitudes, his magnum opus, is an intoxicatingly lush novel-in-verse that follows the wanderings of a shipwrecked man who has been spurned by his lover. Wrenched from civilization and its attendant madness, the desolate hero is transported into a natural world that is...

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's...

In "Propertius: Poet of Love and Leisure," Alison Keith explores Propertius' elegiac poetry in the context of early imperial Roman society. Examining a variety of themes associated with both Propertian poetics (such genre theory, poetic models, the girlfriend, the rival) and the poet's social context within the early Augustan principate (such as Roman imperialism, the elite male cursus honorum, Augustus' building projects) she offers a synthetic overview of Propertius' achievement in his four books of elegies. She considers the neglected relationship of rhetoric to Propertian elegiac...

Beginning in outer space and ending up among the atoms, "Bucolic Ecology" illustrates how these poems repeatedly turn to the natural world in order to define themselves and their place in the literary tradition. It argues that the 'Eclogues' find there both a sequence of analogies for their own poetic processes and a map upon which can be located other landmarks in Greco-Roman literature. Unlike previous studies of this kind, "Bucolic Ecology" does not attribute to Virgil a predominantly Romantic conception of nature and its relationship to poetry, but by adopting such differing approaches...