Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> Ancient & Classical

In laying the groundwork for a fresh and challenging reading of Roman satire, Kirk Freudenburg explores the literary precedents behind the situations and characters created by Horace, one of Rome's earliest and most influential satirists. Critics tend to think that his two books of Satires are but trite sermons of moral reform--which the poems superficially claim to be--and that the reformer speaking to us is the young Horace, a naive Roman imitator of the rustic, self-made Greek philosopher Bion. By examining Horace's debt to popular comedy and to the conventions of Hellenistic moral...

She argues that, although Horace commences the Epistles with an uncompromising insistence on freedom, he ultimately...

Combining faithfulness to the Latin with sensitivity to Prudentius' poetic qualities, Nicholas Richardson offers a precise yet creative verse translation of a major work by one of the most important Christian Latin poets of late antiquity. Prudentius' Hymns for Hours and Seasons also provides readers with a wealth of supporting material which sets the life and output of this poet in its historical, religious and literary context, outlines manuscript and editorial details, discusses metrics and Latinity, and also gives a sense of the individual hymns of the...

Aristotle is justly famed as the founder of literary criticism, but he was not its inventor: his approach was shaped, not only by the ideas newly current in the fourth century, but also by the literature, critical attitudes and language which he inherited. It is this inheritance which concerns the author of Poetry and Criticism Before Plato, first published in 1969: setting the words of poets and critics side by side.

The relationship between the poets and the Muses, and Plato's account of poetic inspiration and metaphorical language are both discussed. In the later chapters...

Latin Explorations, first published in 1963, offers a fresh approach to Roman poetry from Catullus to Ovid. Traditionally, the period is divided for specialist studies - Lyric, Epic and Elegy. In each of them, techniques of interpretation prevail, isolated from contemporary ideas about poetry and dominated by barriers between 'textual', 'exegetical' and 'aesthetic' criticism.

Kenneth Quinn discerns in Roman poetry of this period the adolescence, maturity and decay of a single coherent tradition whose internal unity surpasses differences of form. His argument...

At the Iliad's climax, the great Trojan hero Hektor falls at the hands of Achilles. But who is Hektor? He has resonated with audiences as a tragic hero, great warrior, loyal husband and father, protector of a doomed city. Yet never has a major work sought to discover how these different aspects of Hektor's character accumulate over the course of the narrative to create the devastating effect of his death.
This book documents the experience of Hektor through the Iliad's serial narrative. Drawing on diverse tools from narratology, to cognitive science, but with a special...

An eclectic mix of shapes and subjects populate Taking Shape--Jan D. Hodge's full-length collection of carmina figurata (sometimes called shaped poems, pattern poetry, or figure poems). Hodge's many masterpieces include depictions of a saxophone, a Madonna and Child, a combination piano/guillotine, and other silhouettes of amazing difficulty and detail. These poems are not only visually stunning, they are also sonically beautiful, and retain a transcendent freedom while conforming to both illustrative and metrical constraints. Taking Shape is a visual feast of...