Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia is an introduction to the Eclogues, based on sound scholarship but also personally felt and addressed to a popular audience. It outlines clearly the literary and historical background of Virgil's early poems, discusses each eclogue in some detail, and offers a new and challenging interpretation of the collection as a whole. The ten eclogues are shown to be a young poet's attempt at self-understanding. Their symmetrical arrangement is a journey inward toward the central experience of death, and a journey back toward rebirth and the writing of larger and greater works.

M. Owen Lee, CSB, is a Catholic priest and Professor Emeritus of Classics at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. He is a commentator for the Texaco Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and the author of a number of books on opera, including A Season of Opera: From Orpheus to Ariadne (UTP 1998) and Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art (UTP 199).

M. Owen Lee's profile page

"It is a highly eloquent introduction, written with unusual grace and imaginative sensitivity. Lee has made a very judicial and tasteful use of recent interpretive scholarship avoiding many of the idiosyncrasies and excesses of his predecessors." — Eleanor Winsor Leach, Indiana University, Bloomington

"The Jungian interpretations are not forced and do indeed bring new insights to the archetypal patterns that seem to be present in Virgil." — Charles Fantazzi, University of Windsor