Paperback. Black title and classical bust on the cream and blue cover.

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Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of both Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places where they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet sketches the stories of the poets’ lives and fills in the historical background, while offering crisp modern translations of their finest work and memorably vivid descriptions of the natural world. The result is an entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry-altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.

Reviews:

• Highet, professor of classics, broadcaster and literary critic, was famous for his teaching. This book, first published in 1957, is propelled not just by his love for Latin poetry but by a powerful desire to communicate the details of that love, and a manifest skill in doing so. Horace, Catallus, Juvenal and others are conveyed as individuals; Rome as a city of ‘boiling streets’ to revel in or flee; the varying regional countryside as homeland or retreat. All this is achieved through the meticulous, imaginative use of sparse evidence. The scholarship is cautious but the teaching personal, so that history is enriched, not swamped, with anecdotes. No Latin is assumed, yet through his translations and precisely articulated explanations, Highet conveys the poets’ linguistic brilliance and idiosyncrasies.

• When I was lent this book by my Latin teacher, I took one look at the cover and mistrusted it. I read the blurb and it sat on my bookshelf for a week or seven. However, having read this book I can certainly say that I should not and will not in future judge books by their covers. Highet has written in a very immediate style, comparing Roman poets with the modern day, and somehow bringing them to life by describing their lives within the countryside where they lived. I would definitely recommend this book for any budding classicist!

• Despite its offputting title (shades of Fotherington Thomas), I loved this. An old-fashioned sort of criticism – hardly criticism at all, really, more an attempt at getting across the essence of what each of the poets was. A lot of descriptive accounts of the physical milieu in which they lived. Learning is worn lightly, but with no condescension to the reader. Reminded me a bit of CS Lewis’s writing in the Allegory of Love – no higher praise!

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) was a professor at both Oxford and Columbia. In the 1950s he hosted a radio program called People, Places and Books, which was carried by more than two hundred radio stations, and was a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club. He served as a literary critic for Harper’s Magazine during the early 1950s and was the author of more than a dozen books, including works on literary history, essays, poems, and criticism.