Colin Burrow

Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His books include Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity and Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity, as well as editions of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets. His first contribution to the LRB, in 1999, was on British and Irish poetry of the Civil War; he has since written more than seventy pieces for the paper, on subjects from Catullus and Virgil to Hilary Mantel and Ursula Le Guin.

Letter
Colin Burrow writes: I’m not sure Emily Wilson has quite got me right. As a self-professed ‘Chapmaniac’ (LRB, 27 June 2002), I generally prefer translations of the Homeric poems that respond to their poetic spirit rather than to the letter. Chapman believed he was inspired by Homer, and produced a wonderful if wayward version of the poems. I’d also be one of the last people on earth to want...
Letter

Who Indeed?

5 October 2006

Roger Jones asks: ‘Who on earth is Sylvie Krin?’ (Letters, 19 October). Her deathless romances about royal loves have ornamented Private Eye for many years: ‘Her mind raced back to those blissful, stolen moments that had spelled out their furtive romance, their marriage in all but name. The moment their eyes met at her wedding reception. The quick kiss in the men’s changing room at the Ikea...
Letter
Colin Burrow writes: I’m not sure Emily Wilson has quite got me right. As a self-professed ‘Chapmaniac’ (LRB, 27 June 2002), I generally prefer translations of the Homeric poems that respond to their poetic spirit rather than to the letter. Chapman believed he was inspired by Homer, and produced a wonderful if wayward version of the poems. I’d also be one of the last people on earth to want...
Letter

He got it all from me!

11 October 2018

I am well aware of Mark Jacobs’s work on Laura Riding (Letters, 25 October). To make good my failure to acknowledge her genius, however, I’ll respond to him by quoting a characteristically lucid letter in which Riding accuses William Empson of plagiarising her: ‘What I have to say to you will in part follow in continuation. I thought I should get it all down today, but I can’t. Be sure: I shall...
Letter
Wordsworth’s ‘unlovely cell’ was of course at that notorious slum known as St John’s College, Cambridge, not, as I wrote, at the notorious slum next door known as Trinity College (LRB, 4 July). I apologise to both those august institutions. There are just too many slums in Cambridge.

Don’t break that fiddle: Eclectic Imitators

Tobias Gregory, 19 November 2020

The boundary between the broader and narrower senses has never been firm, and the history of literary imitation has always been bound up with the histories of philosophy, rhetoric and education. Plato,...

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I must needs acknowledge, that the Greeke and Latine tongues, are great ornaments in a Gentleman, but they are purchased at over-high rate. Montaigne, Essays I grew up​ in postwar...

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Mr Who He? Shakespeare’s Poems

Stephen Orgel, 8 August 2002

In his own time, Shakespeare was much better known to the reading public as a poet than as a playwright. Venus and Adonis went through ten editions before his death in 1616, and another six...

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