The Common Spring
Papers on Latin and English Poetry

This collection aims to bring out the continuity between major poets in Latin and English, presenting to a wider audience papers previously published only in academic periodicals along with a number of unpublished pieces.

It contains essays on Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, which are intended for the reader with a genuine but not necessarily specialised interest in Latin poetry. Corresponding papers on English poets, including Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift and Tennyson, emphasise the debt owed to their Roman predecessors. Two more general pieces, on the poetry of romantic love and on classical humanism, further underline the continuity between past and present.

Preface, vii; Acknowledgements, ix; 1 Virgil's Contribution to Pastoral, 1; 2 Necessity and Invention in the Aeneid, 25; 3 Horace's Odes: a Defence of Criticism, 45; 4 Achilles or Agamemnon? Horace, Epistle 1.2.13, 61; 5 Theme and Imagery in Propertius 2.15, 63; 6 Echo and Narcissus: a Study in Duality, 69; 7 The Topicality of Juvenal, 75; 8 The Classical Presence in Titus Andronicus, 95; 9 The Taming of the Shrew: Some Classical Points of Reference, 113; 10 Milton, Sonnet 17 (Carey no. 87): an Avoidable Controversy, 121; 11 Dryden on Horace and Juvenal, 129; 12 Problems of Patronage: Horace Epistles 1.7.46-98 and Swift's Imitation, 143; 13 Variation and Inversion in Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, 161. 14 The Optimistic Lines in Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes, 173; 15 Two Invitations: Tennyson To the Rev. F.D. Maurice and Horace to Maecenas (Odes, 3.29), 177; 16 Romantic Love in Classical Times?, 191; 17 Classical Humanism and its Critics, 213; Notes, 233.

Niall Rudd is Emeritus Professor of Latin in the University of Bristol and Honorary Fellow in the University of Liverpool. Recent work includes (with R.G.M. Nisbet): Horace: Odes III (2004), and Horace: Odes and Epodes (2004).