![]() Though it is idle to try to guess what principle guides this process of selection, I'm struck by the fact that, true to his own muse, Hughes tends in this volume to favor tales that represent "a tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque" (viii). ![]() This story, however, is not one of the stories Hughes chose for his volume. That England's Poet Laureate should have taken notice of this massive reappraisal and set his seal on it makes for a happy irony that Ovid would doubtless appreciate: it is he, after all, who shaped the definitive version of the story of how Daphne became the tree that furnishes laurel crowns for triumphant kings and triumphant poets. ![]() ![]() An impressive witness to the success of this revision of the traditional Western canon is Ted Hughes's timely transformations of Latin's most influential poet and his most intricate poem, The Metamorphoses, into powerful and contemporary English verse. ![]() It has taken the last half century, but finally we see completed the hard labor of summoning Ovid back from the nurseries and the kindergartens where Romantic Hellenism had banished him. ![]()
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