A Reading Life syndication http://www.bibliobuffet.com Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:26:08 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.bibliobuffet.com/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://www.bibliobuffet.com A Reading Life syndication http://www.bibliobuffet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1355&Itemid=193 A Summer of Ancient Poets by Nicki Leone Because of Gilbert Highet, I will always associate the Latin poets with the high shriek of cicadas in the southern summer, and the relentless heat of the August sun turning the air thick and liquid. Summers in the South beat down on you, even the bees in the flowers look stupefied. It’s an effort to move as far as it takes to reach for a glass of lemonade, which is perhaps why I picked up Highet’s book Poets in a Landscape in the first place. If you can barely bestir yourself from your own chair, why not read a book about someone who has gone a-wandering? Poets in a Landscape, originally published in 1957 and newly reprinted this year, is Highet’s idiosyncratic account of traveling through Italy, visiting the towns and villages that were home to the great Latin poets—Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, among others. It is not like the self-indulgent travel accounts so popular these days, with their endless recitations of meals consumed in small trattorias and wines drunk in olive grove picnics. In fact the personal pronoun “I” almost never appears in the book. And “we” is equally rare—uttered only when Highet... Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:03:06 +0100