Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

Detailed new account of the historical emergence and conceptual reach of the sublime both before and after Longinus.

When Cowley died, he was the most famous poet in England. His popularity continued throughout the eighteenth century. Yet Cowley has virtually disappeared from the canon today, even from metaphysical poetry collections, although it was Cowley who occasioned Samuel Johnson’s famous definition of metaphysical poetry. This book considers the circumstances behind Cowley’s falling out of the canon and what he might offer future generations of readers discovering his poetry anew.

Pindar's Library is the first volume to analyse the role played by Pindar's literary, cultic, and scholarly reception in affecting readers' engagement with his poetry, considering the continuities between reading and attending performances, and highlighting elements of readers' experiences which were distinctive to Hellenistic culture.

A collection of critical essays on English poetry during the Age of Sensibility and the Sublime, the half-century between the death of Alexander Pope in 1744 and the death of Robert Burns in 1796.

Hip Sublime explores the rich interactions between American "Beat" writers of the 1940s-60s and the Greco-Roman tradition.

This new translation of Pindar's songs for victorious athletes marries philological rigour with poetic sensibility in order to represent the beauty of his language for a modern audience as closely as possible. Pindar's poetry is synonymous with difficulty for scholars and students of classical studies. His syntax stretches the limits of ancient Greek, while his allusions to mythology and other poetic texts assume an audience that knows more than we now possibly can, given the fragmentary nature of textual and material culture records for ancient Greece. It includes an authoritative introduction, both to the poet and his art and to ancient athletics, alongside brief orientations to the historical context and mythological content of each victory song. The inclusion of a glossary supplies additional mythological and historical information necessary to understanding Pindar's poetry for those coming to the works for the first time. His is the largest body of textual remains that exists for ancient Greece between Homer (conventionally dated to 750 BCE) and the Classical Period (480–323 BCE), and constitutes a rich resource for politics, history, religion, and social practices.

In this ambitious and venturesome book, Peter W. Rose applies the insights of Marxist theory to a number of central Greek literary and philosophical texts. He explores major points in the trajectory from Homer to Plato where the ideology of inherited excellence—beliefs about descent from gods or heroes—is elaborated and challenged. Rose offers subtle and penetrating new readings of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Pindar's Tenth Pythian Ode, Aeschylus's Oresteia, Sophokles' Philoktetes, and Plato's Republic. Rose rejects the view of art as a mere reflection of social and political reality—a view that is characteristic not only of most Marxist but of most historically oriented treatments of classical literature. He applies instead a Marxian hermeneutic derived from the work of the Frankfurt School and Fredric Jameson. His readings focus on illuminating a politics of form within the text, while responding to historically specific social, political, and economic realities. Each work, he asserts, both reflects contemporary conflicts over wealth, power, and gender roles and constitutes an attempt to transcend the status quo by projecting an ideal community. Following Marx, Rose maintains that critical engagement with the limitations of the utopian dreams of the past is the only means to the realization of freedom in the present. Classicists and their students, literary theorists, philosophers, comparatists, and Marxist critics will find Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth challenging reading.

This volume brings together 29 junior and senior scholars to discuss aspects of Hesiod's poetry and its milieu and to explore questions of reception over two and half millennia from shortly after the poems' conception to Twitter hashtags. Rather than an exhaustive study of Hesiodic themes, the Handbook is conceived as a guide through terrain, some familiar, other less charted, examining both Hesiodic craft and later engagements with Hesiod's stories of the gods and moralizing proscriptions of just human behavior. The volume opens with the "Hesiodic Question," to address questions of authorship, historicity, and the nature of composition of Hesiod's two major poems, the Theogony and Works and Days. Subsequent chapters on the archaeology and economic history of archaic Boiotia, Indo-European poetics, and Hesiodic style offer a critical picture of the sorts of questions that have been asked rather than an attempt to resolve debate. Other chapters discuss Hesiod's particular rendering of the supernatural and the performative nature of the Works and Days, as well as competing diachronic and synchronic temporalities and varying portrayals of female in the two poems. The rich story of reception ranges from Solon to comic books. These chapters continue to explore the nature of Hesiod's poetics, as different writers through time single out new aspects of his art less evident to earlier readers. Long before the advent of Christianity, classical writers leveled their criticism at Hesiod's version of polytheism. The relative importance of Hesiod's two major poems across time also tells us a tale of the age receiving the poems. In the past two centuries, artists and writers have come to embrace the Hesiodic stories for themselves for the insight they offer of the human condition but even as old allegory looks quaint to modern eyes new forms of allegory take form.