Amphion

Leah Middlebrook is associate professor of comparative literature and Romance languages at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain, and coeditor of Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds.

• List of FiguresA Note on Orthography and TranslationsPreface: The MythIntroduction: Clarinda’s StonesChapter 1 The Lyre and the WorldChapter 2  Mercurial Translatio: Amphionic Lyric Poetics from Du Bellay to Trevor JoyceChapter 3 How to Do Things with CopiaChapter 4 Amphion in the AmericasCoda: Amphion DancingAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

“What use is a new myth? What difference could it make to see the history of poetry through the lens of a fictive figure of Amphion, who builds cities with the power of song, rather than through that of Orpheus, whose song pits the power of individual desire against intractable fate? With impressively wide-ranging knowledge and profoundly deep learning, Middlebrook provides a resonant answer. Following Amphion as he appears in direct and fugitive ways, in poetic projects ancient and modern, across boundaries of language and culture, Middlebrook allows us to attend to poetry as an art that belongs to this world; invested and implicated—as we are—in projects of civilizational construction, critique, and renewal.”