Customer Reviews

Poets in a Landscape (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Engrossing account of author's visits to various sites around Italy connected with the poems of the greatest poets of ancient Rome: Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, Juvenal and Tibullus. Highet visited the sites before Italy became swamped by modern tourism; his writing and translations of the best of the bests' poetry is extremely absorbing, often evocative, and always helpful to understanding what the poets were trying to say. This is a great book to read alongside your Penguin or Oxford classics and/or while reading/teaching yourself Latin, and would make a great companion on a trip to Italy. The only sad thing about this otherwise handsome Prion edition is it does not include the many fine black and white photographs included in most older editions since the book was published in 1957.

Reviewer # 3 mentions the lack of photographs in some editions.
I own the Akadine Press, 1996 edition (see # 2 under "all editions") and can verify that this edition does include the black and white photos of landscapes, buildings, etc. -
48 photos total.

Makes me appreciate even more why all of those years of conjugating irregular verbs were worthwhile as was that traipsing around the Mediterrarean countryside.

All of these reviews point up important charms of Highet's undertaking, but I would note that they are more than the sum of their parts. Taken together, this excursion into social and cultural history, ancient and modern geography, sociology, linguistics, poetics, architecture and psychology is what intellection is all about. It is a "wow" and an accessible one for non-specialists. I am a professor of ancient history and will promote this to my students, not to increase their knowledge of history, but to increase their pleasure in history and introduce them to why some of us love and value it for PRESENT understandings and insights.

Highet is wonderful. Clear, accessible writing that makes the Classical world come to life. Reading this book made me want to dive into the Odes and other works he describes. Phooey on Postmodernism.

One of the pleasures of studying Latin is the beautiful, literate prose used by the authors of things Roman. Gilbert Highet is a pleasure to read whatever his subject. Reading a book like this makes me sigh for a (probably fictitious) past when education meant polish and and a light touch as well as knowledge.

Short (25-40 page) biographies mixed in with photographs, poems and reflections on the parts of Italy the poets are most associated. Highet makes both the poets and poems come alive and made me want to book my tickets to Italy ASAP. Great book.