Volume 48, Number 5 · March 29, 2001
Breaking Out
By Daniel Mendelsohn
The Throne of Labdacus
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,101 pp., $23.00
Supernatural Love: Poems 1976–1992
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pp., $19.00 (paper)
In a devastating 1920 attack on Gilbert Murray's translation of the Medea, T.S. Eliot bemoaned the fact that 'the Classics have...lost their place as a pillar of the social and political system.'[1] The complaint, of course, is an old one; writers have been grumbling about the decline of the classics since Aristophanes' Frogs, in which the theater god Dionysus, dismayed by the sorry state of the Athenian theater, descends to the Underworld to fetch back Aeschylus and Euripides from the dead.
Review, 4203 words
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