The Metamorphoses: Selected Stories in Verse

Ovid, Frederick Adam Wright

Courier Corporation, Apr 7, 2003 - Poetry - 80 pages

For over two thousand years, readers have delighted in Ovid's playful eloquence; his influence on other writers has ranged from Dante and Chaucer to Shakespeare and Milton. This selection of 30 stories from the verse translation by F. A. Wright of Ovid's famous work, The Metamorphoses, does full justice to the poet's elegance and wit. All of the tales involve a form of metamorphosis, or transformation, and are peopled by the gods, demigods, and mortals of classical mythology: Venus and Adonis, Pygmalion, Apollo and Daphne, Narcissus, Perseus and Andromeda, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Cyclops, and Circe, among others. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

About the author

Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC--AD 17/18), known as Ovid. Born of an equestrian family in Sulmo, Ovid was educated in rhetoric in Rome but gave it up for poetry. He counted Horace and Propertius among his friends and wrote an elegy on the death of Tibullus. He became the leading poet of Rome but was banished in 8 A.D. by an edict of Augustus to remote Tomis on the Black Sea because of a poem and an indiscretion. Miserable in provincial exile, he died there ten years later. His brilliant, witty, fertile elegiac poems include Amores (Loves), Heroides (Heroines), and Ars Amatoris (The Art of Love), but he is perhaps best known for the Metamorphoses, a marvelously imaginative compendium of Greek mythology where every story alludes to a change in shape. Ovid was admired and imitated throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson knew his works well. His mastery of form, gift for narration, and amusing urbanity are irresistible.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Metamorphoses: Selected Stories in Verse; Dover Thrift Editions
• Authors: Ovid, Frederick Adam Wright
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Courier Corporation, 2003
• ISBN: 0486427587, 9780486427584
• Length: 80 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Poetry / Ancient & Classical