The Georgics: A Poem of the Land - Hardcover

Virgil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846142407 ISBN 13: 9781846142406

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2009

Synopsis

A collection of poems that celebrates the eternal beauty of the natural world. It combines practical wisdom on tending the land with fantasy and eulogies to the rhythms of nature. It reflects the cycles of life, death and rebirth, an argument for the nobility of labor and the Roman Empire of Virgil's times.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In new spring, when from snowy peaks runoff
flows, and the mouldering clod crumbles under the Zephyr,
straightaway I'd hitch my bull to groan before the deep-
driven plow, its blade scoured to gleaming by the furrow.
That field alone fulfills the keen farmer's prayer
which twice sun and twice frost has felt:
its teeming harvests burst the granaries.
But before our iron carves an unknown plain,
let our study be to learn its winds and fickle sky,
the local tricks, the temper of the land,
what each zone yields, what each refuses.

About the Author:

Virgil was born in 70 BC in northern Italy. He wrote his Eclogues between 42 and 37 BC, when he began work on his second major poem, the Georgics. Virgil is best known for his epic the Aeneid.

Kimberly Johnson is a poet and a scholar of Renaissance literature. She is the author of two collections of poetry and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1846142407
• ISBN 13: 9781846142406
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224