Virgil in English belongs to the new Penguin series of Poets in Translation,[1]which (alleges the back cover) “offers the best translations in English, through the centuries, of the major classical and European poets.” For the common reader, and even for the not-so-common reader, it is hard to imagine a more attractive project than that. If it were rightly executed, a volume of the kind promised would present at least three very great benefits. A reader who did not know the language used by the poet concerned would here be brought as near as he could hope to get to the singing voice of the master, and to those all-important imponderables that a literal prose translation can hardly supply—the mood, the atmosphere, the variations of tone and pace. A lifelong student of the poet, as well as an amateur, would find pleasure here, and insight too: since any really sensitive translation will bring out details, if not entire dimensions, that the reader has missed before. Finally, such a book would constitute an enjoyable mini-anthology of poetry in English, given unity by the common focus on a single foreign poet and yet full of shocks and surprises, bringing to light unknown poems and juxtaposing poems never before seen on the same page. If humanism has something to do with a deeper feeling for the powers of one’s own language, and at the same time a wider awareness of the richness of other epochs and other nations, then here—or so