The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord - Paperback

by Anthony Esolen (Author)

The Hundredfold is a tapestry of hymns, monologues, and short lyrics knit together as one book-length poem in praise of Christ in all his startling humanity. Drawing from the riches of the English poetic tradition--meter, rhyme, music--the poet considers the mysterious man from Nazareth and the world he came to set on fire with splendor.

Having made a career translating the Italian masters Dante and Tasso, Anthony Esolen now puts on the dusty mantle of such English craftsmen as Donne, Milton, and Hopkins in his first book of original contemplative poetry. The Hundredfold contains dramatic monologues set in first-century Greece and Palestine; lyrical meditations on creation, longing, failure, modern emptiness, and unshakeable hope; and twenty-one brand-new hymns, set to such traditional melodies as "Picardy" and "Old One-Hundred-Twenty-Fourth".

The book includes an introduction with diamond-sharp insights into English poetic form--at a time when form is so often misunderstood, if not dismissed. It provides an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and poets themselves, as well as those who simply read poetry for pleasure.

Author Biography

Anthony Esolen translated the Modern Library edition of The Divine Comedy, as well as the Johns Hopkins edition of Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. An award-winning contributor to nume

Anthony Esolen translated the Modern Library edition of The Divine Comedy, as well as the Johns Hopkins edition of Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. An award-winning contributor to numerous periodicals, he has authored fourteen books of nonfiction, including Defending Boyhood, Out of the Ashes, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, as well as a book of poetry, The Hundredfold. He has taught at universities since 1987 and currently serves as professor of literature and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire.