Ovid's Causes: Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses

Ovid’s Causes offers a new reassessment of the poet’s longest and most difficult poem, the Metamorphoses. This poem has long been denied epic stature because of its stylistic and thematic diversity. K. Sara Myers demonstrates that the poem must be understood as the inheritor and interpreter of the Roman tradition of cosmological epic. She situates the poem in the traditions and conventions of Roman poetry and considers the ways in which it both fulfills and overturns the expectations of the epic genre.   The first and final chapters of this book examine the scientific and cosmological framework of the poem. Ovid’s juxtaposition of scientific and mythological explanations is an aspect of his sophisticated manipulation of truth and fiction, and of the claims of philosophical poetry and mythological poetry.   This illuminating study presents much useful material for students of Roman poetry or of Greek literary influences that profoundly influenced its development. Students and scholars of ancient poetical traditions will likewise find much of interest.  

''The most acute rendering of an era’s sensibility is its poetry,'' wrote the editors in their preface to the first edition. Thirty years later, this innovative, cover-to-cover revision renders with fresh eyes and meticulous care the remarkable ran...

This book is the first book devoted entirely to Hughes as an environmental activist and writer. Drawing on the rapidly-growing interest in poetry and the environment, the book deploys insights from ecopoetics, ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies t...

Since its first publication in 1965, this collection has been widely hailed as the best available text of William Blake's poetry and prose. It is now expanded to include a new foreword by Harold Bloom, his definitive statement on Blake's greatness.

Narrative Unbound is the first full-scale interpretation of the verbal text of Blake's most complex long poetic prophecy, The Four Zoas. Never engraved or published in the poet/artist's lifetime, the poem remains in a single manuscript, apparently un...