Shakespeare, Racine, Michelangelo, Bonnefoy, Poussin, du Bouchet, Melville, Auster, Tintoretto, Dickinson, Mahler, Caravaggio, Stevens, Monteverdi, Vermeer—these are but a few of the epochal figures discussed in Arion. In his essays on literature and the arts, which span more than five decades, Hoyt Rogers presents us with fresh and eclectic perspectives on reading, writing, viewing, and listening.

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Hoyt Rogers’ sumptuous collection of essays spans a lifetime of work as a reader, writer, critic, translator, and traveller. Full of discoveries of little-known texts and artworks, and new insights into old ones, it is written with an unerring ear, a remarkably discriminating eye, and a lucid intelligence.
—Terence Cave, Oxford University

As I read and reread Hoyt Rogers’ essays in Arion on literature, life, and visual art, Kierkegaard’s title Works of Love repeatedly popped into my mind. From his decades-long friendships with and extraordinary translations of the great French poets André du Bouchet and Yves Bonnefoy to his subtle analyses of Shakespeare, Tintoretto, and the contemporary Dominican poets, Frank Báez and Homero Pumarol, Rogers’ brilliance turns on a profound understanding of the transformative glories made possible by a person’s lifelong, intimate relations with works of art. Every one of these luminous essays is a work of love.
—Siri Hustvedt, essayist and novelist

The topics that Rogers tackles from Shakespeare to Tintoretto and from Yves Bonnefoy to the quietude of Vermeer’s world, constitute a vast array of surprising perspectives, but they really converge, again and again, on the single essential theme of  “human love in its transient splendor.” Love and loss are the living elements that Rogers gathers and transmutes into a liberating spiritual feast.
—Anne Davenport, Boston College

Writing with depth and passion, Rogers offers readers moving interpretations of Shakespeare that open out to a wide horizon of poetic, intimate and intellectual interpretations. Rogers wears his scholarship lightly, but these essays draw on a lifetime of study of Renaissance poetic forms and incorporate key scholarly questions. He shows us how Shakespeare’s words become brighter when read in the broader world of ideas created by poets and intellectuals from past centuries to now. As a writer of poetry himself, he also brings a poet’s eye to the sonnets and plays: his readings touch the mind and the heart.
—Susanne Wofford, New York University

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