Imitations

Not quite translations - yet something much more, much richer, than mere tributes to their original versions - the poems in Imitations reflect Lowell's conceptual, historical, literary, and aesthetic engagements with a diverse range of voices from the Western canon. Moving chronologically from Homer to Pasternak - and including such master poets en route as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Montale - the fascinating and hugely informed pieces in this book are themselves meant to be read as "a whole," according to Lowell's telling Introduction, "a single volume, a small anthology of European poetry."