Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths
Nina Kossman, Ted Hughes, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Valéry, Bertolt Brecht, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce Carol Oates, Gregory Corso, Margaret Atwood, Wallace Stevens, Robert Graves, Rainer Maria Rilke, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Anne Sexton, Günter Grass, Robert Frost, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Denise Levertov, Anna Akhmatova, Lucille Clifton, Mark Strand, Constantinos P. Cavafy, W.S. Merwin, Gabriel Zaid, Zbigniew Herbert, Marin Sorescu, Frank O'Hara, Osip Mandelstam, Umberto Saba, Yiannis Ritsos, D.M. Thomas, Adam Zagajewski, Charles Olson, Eavan Boland, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Archibald MacLeish, Marina Tsvetaeva, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Charles Simic, George Oppen, George Seferis, Theodore Roethke, Joseph Brodsky, Wisława Szymborska
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· 2 ratings · 320 pages · Published: 01 Jan 2001
Perhaps it is because the myths echo the structure of our unconscious that every new generation of poets finds them a source of inspiration and self-recognition, says Nina Kossman in her introduction to this marvelous collection. Indeed, from Valery, Yeats, Lawrence, Rilke, Akhmatova, and Auden writing in the first half of the century to such contemporary poets as Lucille Clifton, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Wislawa Szymborska, and Mark Strand, the material of Greek myth has elicited a poetry of remarkably high achievement. And by organizing the poems first into broad categories such as Heroes, Lovers, Trespassers, and secondly around particular mythological figures such as Persephone, Orpheus, or Narcissus, readers are treated to a fascinating spectrum of poems on the same subject. For example, the section on Odysseus includes poems by Cavafy, W. S. Merwin, Gregory Corso, Gabriel Zaid, Louise Gluck, Wallace Stevens, and many others. Thus we are allowed to see the familiar Greek hero refracted through the eyes, and sharply varying stylistic approaches, of a wide range of poets from around the world.
Here, then, is a collection of extraordinary poems that testifies to--and amply rewards--our ongoing fascination with classical myth.
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