Common Spring: Essays 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English, presenting to a wider audience papers previously published only in academic periodicals along with a number of unpublished pieces.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.

From the early '60s Niall Rudd was in the forefront of those applying to ancient poetry the 'new criticism' - then seen as a controversial departure from traditional philological scholarship. In this collection Niall Rudd takes account of modern critical concerns without abandoning 'traditional' modes of argument.