The elegies of Quintilius - Peter Russell

Peter Russell is at his lyrical and satirical best in the Elegies of his alter ego Quintilius, a disaffected and maverick late Latin poet whose scabrous observations on the last decadent days and collapse of the Roman Empire, seen from a provincial perspective, are sharply pertinent to our own age. This enlarged edition reissues with much uncollected material a famous modernist jeu d'esprit which gave Peter Russell his true poetic voice - dyspeptic, witty, coruscating and chilled by sudden apprehensions of mortality.

Peter Russell, born in Bristol in 1921, was editor of the influential magazine Nine (1945–56). He left England in the early 1960s, and lived and taught in Germany, the USA, Canada, Iran and Italy, which was his main home since 1964. His many books include An Examination of Ezra Pound (ed., 1950) and All for the Wolves, his Selected Poems 1947–1975, published by Anvil in 1984. He died in 2003.