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OTIS, Br., Virgil. A Study in Civilized Poetry. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966. Reprint from corrected sheets 1st ed. XIII,436p. Original blue cloth. Spine gilt titled. Lacking dust wrps. Plasticized. Signature on free endpaper. ‘This is an ambitious and interesting book, perhaps the most important on Virgil since Heinze, building on the work of Klinger, Perret and Pöschl. It does not review Virgil’s works in a general and appreciative manner, like Rand or Prescott, but addresses itself to a single and central problem. How could Virgil, having once adhered to Callimachus’ condemnation of attempts to imitate Homer, bring himself to make the attempt, and hope to breathe life into a form some seven hundred years obsolete? (…) How (…) could Virgil conceive the preposterous ambition to revive heroic-age epic in the absence of a living tradition in an urban civilisation that had more in common with New York that with Mycenae? Virgil’s three works are seen as forming one consistent development of an essentially Augustan ‘symbol-complex’, and only by developing also a new dramatic style, ‘empathetic’ and ‘editorial’, could Virgil give Homeric form to his modern, humane and ‘civilised’ insight. (…) Here at last is a book on Virgil which we can recommend our university students and others to take seriously as scholarship and literary criticism, combining a wide vision with detailed analysis, although it is long and not easy, nor written with elegance.’ (COLIN HARDIE in The Journal of Roman Studies, 1964, pp.246-249). € 30.00 (Antiquarian)