The English Miscellany

Piero di Cosimo, The discovery of honey by Bacchus (1499) Book Review A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid . Edited by John F. Miller and Carole. E. Newlands. Wiley-Blackwell. 2014. 520pp. £120 (Cloth). £96.99 (ebook) ‘Antiquity is a closed system, providing a canon of texts whose perfection is beyond time: criticism of these texts is an eternal return, the rediscovery of the timeless verities that they contain.’ [....] ‘ No one, of course, has ever really believed this nonsense .’ (Fowler, 1994: 231) This new collection of thirty-one essays explores how Ovid’s works have presented a range of ways of thinking and feeling about desire, love and death; power and aggression; exile and alienation; self-reflexivity and transformation; aesthetic traditions and the artist’s journey. Clearly, the universality of Ovid’s major themes and preoccupations helps to explain his major influence on the arts of the two millennia since his death. As a result, it is not difficult

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour July 13, 1798 . Extract. Once again I see            These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines                   Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,             Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke   Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!           With some uncertain notice, as might seem         Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,                Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire       The Hermit sits alone.            These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me     As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:            But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din            Of towns and cities, I have owed to them           In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,             Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;            And passing even