Poets in a Landscape (Lost Treasures S.) - Softcover

Highet, Gilbert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853753017 ISBN 13: 9781853753015

Publisher: Prion Books Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

Using the poet's native Italian landscapes, Gilbert Highet recreates these poets "in situ" to evoke the essence of their work. His translations summon a land enchanted by presences - from Horace's beloved Tivoli to Ovid in the Abruzzi. Highet lets each poet tell his own story - their pleasures and agonies, passions and hates and above all their devotion to the natural world around them.

About this title

Review

What a delight to have a new edition of this inspirational book.  Highet, professor of classics, broadcaster and literary critic, was famous for his teaching.  This book, first published in 1957, is propelled not just by his love for Latin poetry but by a powerful desire to communicate the details of that love, and a manifest skill in doing so.  Horace, Catallus, Juvenal and others are conveyed as individuals; Rome as a city of 'boiling streets' to revel in or flee; the varying regional countryside as homeland or retreat.  All this is achieved through the meticulous, imaginative use of sparse evidence.  The scholarship is cautious but the teaching personal, so that history is enriched, not swamped, with anecdotes.  No Latin is assumed, yet through his translations and precisely articulated explanations, Highet conveys the poets' linguistic brilliance and idiosyncrasies.  Sadly, the slightly eccentric selection of grainy black and white photographs in the original have gone, and a map would really help.  But there is compensation in Michael Putnam's brief, illuminating preface. (Guardian)

Highet loved the Latin poets with an obvious passion and his way with verse was second only to his sense of place. (Scotsman)

About the Author

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) was a professor at both Oxford and Columbia. In the 1950s he hosted a radio program called People, Places and Books, which was carried by more than two hundred radio stations, and was a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club. He served as a literary critic for Harper's Magazine during the early 1950s and was the author of more than a dozen books, including works on literary history, essays, poems, and criticism.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prion Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1853753017
• ISBN 13: 9781853753015
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276