Books about Elegiac from Amazon.com

Student Edition The passion and immediacy of Catullus’ lyrics can for readers obscure the complexity of his poems’ moods and subjects Informed by the latest in Catullan scholarship, Ronnie Ancona gives Catullus’ poems their due. Writing Passion: A Catullus Reader presents the forty-two poems that are required reading for the 2005 AP Latin Literature Exam. The format includes line-by-line notes and vocabulary and a variety of enhancements, making it easily accessible to both teachers and students. A separate teacher’s guide is also available. Special Features... Ancona’s pedagogical expertise and scholarly work on Catullus have produced an outstanding text that features: introduction to Catullus’ life, historical/social and literary background, and the Catullan corpus Latin text of 42 poems excerpted from Catullus, ed/ D. F. S. Thomson (Univ. Toronto 1997). Includes Catullus 1-5, 7, 8, 10–14a. 22. 30, 31, 35, 36, 40, 43–46, 49–51, 60, 64 (lines 50–253), 65, 68–70, 72, 76, 77, 84–87, 96, 101, 109, 116 bibliography a short, thought-provoking introduction to each poem line-by-line notes and vocabulary on same page as Latin text appendices: meters; metricals terms/tropes or figures of thought/rhetorical figures or figures of speech Latin text of poems without notes or vocabulary complete vocabulary

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Catullus Expanded Edition - ISBN 086516603X
Catullus : a Legamus Transitional Reader - ISBN 086516634X.
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Tennyson's central poem is presented with an extensive introduction that provides background information on the poet and poem as well as an overview of In Memoriam's formal and thematic peculiarities, including Tennyson's use of the stanza and the poem's rhyme scheme.

The authoritative text is again that of the Eversley Edition of Tennyson's Works, published in 1901—8, which is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations.

"Criticism" contains thirteen essays--seven of which are new to the Second Edition-among them examples of formal (Sarah Gates), contextual (W. David Shaw), reader-response (Timothy Peltason), queer (Jeff Nunokawa), and genre (Alan Sinfield) criticism. A chapter from Christopher Ricks's influential biography, Tennyson, is included.

A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index of First Lines are also included.

About the series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide..
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Of all Greek and Latin poets Catullus is perhaps the most accessible to the modern reader. Dealing candidly with the basic human emotions of love and hate, his virile, personal tone exerts a powerful appeal on all kinds of readers. The 116 poems collected in this new translation include the famous Lesbia poems and display the full range of Catullus's mastery of lyric meter, mythological themes, and epigrammatic invective and wit..
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Catullus, who lived during some of the most interesting and tumultuous years of the late Roman Republic, spent his short but intense life (?84-54 B.C.E.) in high Roman society, rubbing shoulders with various cultural and political luminaries, including Caesar, Cicero, and Pompey. Catullus's poetry is by turns ribald, lyric, romantic, satirical; sometimes obscene and always intelligent, it offers us vivid pictures of the poet's friends, enemies, and lovers. The verses to his friends are bitchy, funny, and affectionate; those to his enemies are often wonderfully nasty. Many poems brilliantly evoke his passionate affair with Lesbia, often identified as Clodia Metelli, a femme fatale ten years his senior and the smart, adulterous wife of an arrogant aristocrat. Cicero later claimed she poisoned her husband.
This new bilingual translation of Catullus's surviving poems by Peter Green is fresh, bawdy, and utterly engaging. Unlike its predecessors, it adheres to the principle that the rhythm of a poem, whether familiar or not, is among the most crucial elements for its full appreciation. Green provides an essay on the poet's life and literary background, a historical sketch of the politically fraught late Roman Republic in which Catullus lived, copious notes on the poems, a wide-ranging bibliography for further reading, and a full glossary..
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Catullus, who lived during some of the most interesting and tumultuous years of the late Roman Republic, spent his short but intense life (?84-54 B.C.E.) in high Roman society, rubbing shoulders with various cultural and political luminaries, including Caesar, Cicero, and Pompey. Catullus's poetry is by turns ribald, lyric, romantic, satirical; sometimes obscene and always intelligent, it offers us vivid pictures of the poet's friends, enemies, and lovers. The verses to his friends are bitchy, funny, and affectionate; those to his enemies are often wonderfully nasty. Many poems brilliantly evoke his passionate affair with Lesbia, often identified as Clodia Metelli, a femme fatale ten years his senior and the smart, adulterous wife of an arrogant aristocrat. Cicero later claimed she poisoned her husband.
This new bilingual translation of Catullus's surviving poems by Peter Green is fresh, bawdy, and utterly engaging. Unlike its predecessors, it adheres to the principle that the rhythm of a poem, whether familiar or not, is among the most crucial elements for its full appreciation. Green provides an essay on the poet's life and literary background, a historical sketch of the politically fraught late Roman Republic in which Catullus lived, copious notes on the poems, a wide-ranging bibliography for further reading, and a full glossary..
Price: $8.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A collection of poetic responses to loss--both consolation and inspiration to any reader. Death has always served as one of the most powerful catalysts for poetry. Whether with Dylan Thomas, counseling readers to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," or with Walt Whitman, taking comfort in the serene arrival "sooner or later" of "delicate death," poets throughout history have faced the mortal losses that all of us inevitably encounter. Inventions of Farewell collects English language poems of mourning from the late middle ages to the present. Aesthetic assumptions and poetic styles have altered over the centuries, yet the great and often terrifying themes of time, change, age, and death are timeless. The poems here--from Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Sharon Olds, Stanley Kunitz, and W. S. Merwin--trace the trajectory of grief, but they also illustrate how the deepest sorrow has produced countless poignant and resonant works of art--words that can aid us as we struggle with our own farewells. .
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Eagle Pond Farm, familiar even to casual readers of poet Donald Hall (author of 13 volumes of poetry spanning over 40 years), constitutes his spiritual and geographic center. He moved there permanently in 1975 after marrying the young and talented poet Jane Kenyon. His long relationship to Eagle Pond Farm and the creative haven the two poets created gives Without a special poignancy. It is where, in 1995, Jane Kenyon died.

The facts are hard but simple. In 1994, Jane Kenyon--who at 46 was beginning to enjoy the growing recognition of her work--was diagnosed with leukemia. Kenyon and Hall opted for the harrowing bone marrow transplant, to be performed in Seattle. It was not successful, and 12 weeks later, she was dead. Hall began drafting Without during the procedure and subsequent treatment, an act almost impossible to imagine--or perhaps for a poet, the only act possible in the face of what for most would be unspeakable. The magnitude of such suffering might indeed explain the collection's flatness of tone, as if grief can be touched only across great distances.

However restrained the pieces, Hall's gaze is fearless. Shifts in voice (he writes both in first and third person) create a tension that pulls the reader forward, as if compelled to consume this moving, raw account in one sitting. The quality of reader attention is more akin to what one gives a story. Narrative elements include a terse account of the bone-marrow transplant and Kenyan's subsequent radiation treatments ("It was as if she capped the Chernobyl pile with her body"), and it's here that the poems become almost unbearable to read.

Without captures the tedium of dying, jolted by surges of rage and "witless" love. Numbly, it lists the flinty details of Kenyon's last days, spent choosing the poems for her last volume, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems. It describes the moment of her dying in a way that makes one wonder if the ultimate experience of intimacy is to watch the beloved die, to be the one to close her eyes. "Back home from the grave," Hall writes toward the end of this volume, "behind my desk I made / a gallery of Janes," but it can be said that every poem presents a facet of his wife while dying, accruing finally to a gallery of love and grief.

There are some distinguishing jolts to our familiar concepts about death as in, for example, the poem showing the couple, with their minister, praying and holding hands. And when they prayed, "grace was evident / but not the comfort of mercy or reprieve / The embodied figure / on the cross still twisted under the sun." By and large, however, it's a volume not remarkable for bold imagery or shocking connections; rather for the expression of raw grief that follows, unwelcome, all of our necessary losses. --Hollis Giammatteo.
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In an award winning book of literary scholarship, Sacks explores the functions as well as forms of convention and provides an interpretive study of the elegy as a genre. "The English Elegy" is an ambitious and humane book, an eloquent work on the poetry of mourning. (Poetry).
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