))
Martin Bidney - The Beloving Imaginer Episode 19 - VIRGIL’S ECLOGUES WITH VERSE REPLIES
Manage episode 315995408 series 3203561
Content provided by Martin Bidney. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Martin Bidney or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
PODCAST #19: VIRGIL’S ECLOGUES WITH VERSE REPLIES On the back cover I write, summing up the global importance of this ancient Roman work: “One of the major bisexual imaginings in world literature, the Eclogues of Virgil are ancient Roman musical masterworks, rivaling the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Every wordsong in the group of ten is a one-act play, and every character is a music lover. Love and Death are always with us, to enjoy and to suffer, but word music is the great transcender: Art redeems Life. Since the works in this collection are rather longer than those I’ve worked with before, I’ll recite, among Virgil’s poems, only Eclogue Two, featuring the love soliloquy of Corydon, lamenting the inattention of his male friend Alexis and pleading for a more encouraging response to the would-be lover’s gifts and requests. I then recite “Virgil and Shakespeare,” the opening section of my verse reply to the eclogue, important in highlighting a central fact about the Virgilian achievement in this volume: as a triumph of bisexual lyrical imagining, it is the precursor of the Shakespeare Sonnets.
55 episodes
Share
