Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Who knew?

… John Milton, Latin Love Poet | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Juster’s edition is not only for the Latin student or undergraduate. Any devotee of good poetry will find plenty to delight them in Juster’s translation of the seven long elegies that constitute the bulk of Milton’s little book. The themes are an excellent introduction to the full gamut of two millennia of Latin elegy. We find a couple of mournful elegies, one on the death of a Oxford beadle and another on a Westminster bishop. Three epistolary elegies put his work in context with Latin verse production of the time, especially Elegy 4, which Milton directed to his tutor Thomas Young, who was then in Hamburg. Did Milton imagine this as a possible means of raising himself to international attention?

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