The Love Poems by Ovid

The Love Poems by Ovid

Ovid's love-poetry was typically original and innovative. His witty analysis in the Amores (Loves) of the elegiac relationship develops with relentless irony its essential paradox - love as simultaneously fulfilling and destructive - to its logical conclusion: definitive disestablishment of the poet-lover's role as presented by Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius. In its place he went on to offer in the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love) an equally brilliant presentation of an alternative and more realistic conception of love as a game at which both sexes can play without getting hurt - providing they stick to Ovid's rules. Under the surface of Ovid's wit there runs an undercurrent of serious meaning: the theme of the poet's complete control of his medium and his art and a proud consciousness of his achievements. His claim to be 'the Virgil of elegy' is arrestingly justified in these extraordinarily accomplished poems. Alan Melville's accomplished translations match the sophisticated elegance of Ovid's Latin. Their witty modern idiom is highly entertaining.In this volume he has included the brilliant version of the Art of Love by Moore, published more than fifty years ago and still unequalled; the small revisions he has made will enhance the reader's admiration for Moore's achievement.

Ovid: -

Ovid (43 BC-17/18 AD) was a Roman poet. Born in Sulmo the year after Julius Caesar's assassination, Ovid would join the ranks of Virgil and Horace to become one of the foremost poets of Augustus' reign as first Roman emperor. After rejecting a life in law and politics, he embarked on a career as a poet, publishing his first work, the Heroides, in 19 BC. This was quickly followed by his Amores (16 BC), a collection of erotic elegies written to his lover Corinna. By 8 AD, Ovid finished his Metamorphoses, an epic narrative poem tracing the history of Rome and the world from the creation of the cosmos to the death and apotheosis of Julius Caesar. Ambitious and eminently inspired, Metamorphoses remains a timeless work of Roman literature and an essential resource for the study of classical languages and mythology. Exiled that same year by Augustus himself, Ovid spent the rest of his life in Tomis on the Black Sea, where he continued to write poems of loss, repentance and longing.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780192836335
ISBN 10	0192836331
Title	The Love Poems
Author	Ovid
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	1998-11-01
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable