When it was first published in 1997, this book was immediately recognized as the best rendering of Ovid in generations, a classic in its own right, and a major book in Ted Hughes's oeuvre. The Metamorphoses of Ovid stands with the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante , and Milton as a classic of world poetry. Hughes, one of the most admired and widely read poets of our day, translated twenty-four of its stories, legends connected by their transformational motifs. The result is the most vigorous and supple twentieth-century version of the classic, at once a delight for the Latinist and an appealing introduction to Ovid for the general reader.
