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Idylls

Theocritus

Translated by Robert Wells

Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • Theocritus
    Ancient Greek poet Theocritus ' history is uncertain and biographical information must be pieced together through his poetry. It is most possible he was born in Syracuse, as he claims in his verse to be a countryman of Homer's Sicilian Cyclops. Speculation places him variously around the Mediterranean throughout his lifetime, ... read more
    Robert Wells
    Robert Wells was born in Oxford in 1947. He has worked as a woodman, a teacher, and in publishing. He lives in France. Carcanet has published his translations of Virgil's Georgics and The Idylls of Theocritus, and five volumes of his poetry, the latest being Collected Poems and Translations (2009). ... read more
    Praise for Robert Wells 'Robert Wells understands how finely man and nature are moulded to each other... The healing loneliness of hills and waters, and the solitary figures who move among them - bathers, wood-cutters, hay harvesters - are the setting and characters of Wells's poems.'
    George Mackay Brown
    'Wells is a quiet poet... he inherits the tender, threatening profundity of Edward Thomas.'
    Anne Stevenson
    'Robert Wells's language is exact, the experience of the poem is deeply gone through, there is a constant desire to adhere to the truth as he apprehended it rather than to glamorize it. The inexpressible becomes expressed. At one point I started marking my favourite poems, but I like so many of them that I gave up.'
    Thom Gunn
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