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 were 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.

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.

 

Michael C. J. Putnam is the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics at Brown University. His most recent book is The Virgilian Tradition, co-edited with Jan Ziolkowski.