Not quite translations—yet something much more, much richer, than mere tributes to their original versions—the poems in
Imitations
reflect Lowell's conceptual, historical, literary, and aesthetic engagements with a diverse range of voices from the Western canon. Moving chronologically from Homer to Pasternak—and including such master poets en route as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Montale—the fascinating and hugely informed pieces in this book are themselves meant to be read as "a whole," according to Lowell's telling Introduction, "a single volume, a small anthology of European poetry."