Virgil

Virgil, the dominant figure in all Latin literature, has inspired and influenced poets for two millennia. In this book, David R. Slavitt, himself a poet as well as a novelist and critic, evaluates Virgil's achieivement for the modern reader. His appraisal brings a poet's sensitivity not only to the meaning and the play of language and image in the works but also to the pressures virgil faced in his literary production - the sometimes arbitrary requirements of his audience and patrons. In the preface, Slavitt furnishes biographical and historical context. The three major sections of the book offer provocative analyses of Virgil's works - the the "Eclogues", the "Georgics", and the "Aeneid" - using slavitt's own translations for the first two series of poems. An epilogue gives a fascinating account of Virgil's continuing popularity: the legends that grew up about him in the Middle Ages as a magician or necromancer, and the reasons that Dante chose Virgil as his guide to the underworld in "The Divine Comedy".