Classical Odes
The first four-book Odes since Horace, England's nation-statehood and cultural legacy being superseded by Europeanness and globalism to elegiac feeling.
The first four-book Odes since Horace, England's nation-statehood and cultural legacy being superseded by Europeanness and globalism to elegiac feeling.
The first four-book Odes since Horace, England's nation-statehood and cultural legacy being superseded by Europeanness and globalism to elegiac feeling.
Poetry (general)
In Classical Odes Nicholas Hagger achieves a blend of poetry and history, of the traditions of Herodotus and Pausanias (both of whom visited classical sites) and of Virgil and Horace (who wrote of everyday life in the countryside). In the first four-book Odes since Horace, he addresses the concerns regarding Western civilisation of Pound, Eliot and Yeats-particularly, the concern Eliot had about the impact of Europe on the man of letters-and finds a new way of carrying them forward. He catches the mood of our time: dismay at the end of the Great Britain of Churchill and Montgomery, elegiac feeling that Englishness is being superseded by Europeanness and globalism, and Britain's hesitant fumblings for a new identity in a time of transition. Never before has Western civilization's cultural legacy been captured in verse that has such contemporary relevance.
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He hits a pace, a tilt, that really carries the reader along...Everything comes as a subordinate clause to his dramatic momentum, a hand waving out of the express train window. ~ Ted Hughes, Former Poet Laureate
His poetic felicities include a poetic mix of Eliot, Pound and Blake; the judicious invention of his own psychological terms to guide his progress; an unafraid nakedness, linked to philosophic and scientific adventurousness; genuine visionary leanings and occasional lyric beauty. ~ Sebastian Barker, Past chairman of The Poetry Society
Nicholas Hagger writes with a rare intellectual passion. ~ Sir Laurens van der Post