Odes, Elegies and Epigrams

by Peter Washington (editor)

The great Roman poets of Antiquity wrote some of the most compelling lyrical poetry of all time, to be read privately but also on occasion to be performed publicly on the field of victory, at a banquet or at a public festival. With a freshness that belie the nearly two thousand years that separate us Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Propertius and Catullus write movingly of the pleasures of love, of wine, of nature and the joys of pastoral life, a city and its contrasts, of friendship and of death. This edition brings together an exceptional selection with translations by Christpoher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, Robert Herrick, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Alfred Tennyson, A. E. Houseman and Rudyard Kipling. This edition is illustrated with the magnificent classical engravings of Johannes Pine's great edition of Horace of 1737. Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say Tomorrow do thy worst for I have lived today. Horace's ode iii, tr. by John Dryen

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 1997

Reviews

[Patrick Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Along with Kavanagh’s Oxford Book of Short Poems, and Williams’s English Renaissance Poetry, one of the finest anthologies of poetry I’ve had the pleasure to read.