The debts that English poetry owes to the Classics are massive and various. But they have been richly repaid by the astonishingly inventive tradition of translation to which some of the greatest poets in the English language have contributed, including Chaucer and Jonson, Dryden and Pope, Tennyson and Ezra Pound

This anthology presents the wealth of this living tradition as it has never been seen before, ranging from King Alfred to contemporary poets such as Ted Hughes, and from North America to Ireland and Scotland. It offers a vast array of responses to the song, verse, and drama of ancient Greece and Rome, and to poets themselves as varied as Homer, Sappho, and Euripides; Virgil, Ovid, and Juvenal. Organized by classical author and text, it runs from the epics of Homer to the late antique world where Greek and Latin writing both faced an emerging Christian culture, and juxtaposes English versions, sometimes of the same passage or poem, to dramatize the endless re-animation of one great poetic tradition in and through another.