Ovid recalled [1 ed.]

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The bimillennium of Ovid’s birth falls in 1957, and it is time we took stock of him again. For too long he has been neglected; probably because too many Ido’ the duller parts of him at school and never get over their distaste. Mr Wilkinson provides a second introduction: to Ovid himself and to his whole work. He writes to communicate his own evident enjoyment and understanding. A hfe tells what is known of the poet, and serves as a framework to the account of the poetry. The puritanism of the last century was unfair to a man who was, despite his faults, what Macaulay called him, ‘a good fellow’. But he was also a wit, the product of an age of re¬ finement; more important, he was an artist with conscious mastery of a great range of literary artifice; his poetry has a studied move¬ ment, a grace, a rich and patterned surface, a music, that have appealed to readers and writers with an ear for ‘technique’ ever since. In the Metamorphoses (here analysed in detail) he transformed the common stock of mythology into a new world made real by the detail of his verse, and poignant by its music, a world which fascinated Shakespeare, Milton and Goethe and has attracted artists as diverse as Rubens, John Martin and Picasso. Himself the greatest worker of transforma¬ tions, he has been ever since variously trans¬ formed. Painters, poets, musicians, weavers of tapestries, even makers of porcelain, have drawn on him to the point where his is one of the great (and now unrecognized) formative in¬ fluences on European literary and artistic modes. Mr Wilkinson’s book follows Ovid’s later fortunes. It will be eagerly read by those who remember their Latin; those who have for¬ gotten it will find the ample quotation translated into excellent heroic couplets.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

HORACE AND HIS LYRIC POETRY LETTERS OF CICERO (Bles)

OVID RECALLED

... le plus gentil et le plus ingenieux de tous les poetes grecs et latins. GASPAR BACHET, SIEUR DE MfiziRIAC

(1626)

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OVID RECALLED BY L. P. WILKINSON * *