As the twentieth century drew to its close Ovid’s star shone brightly in the sky, at least of the Anglo-Saxon world. Two volumes of adaptations of stories from the Metamorphoses, published by Faber & Faber, turned out to be bestsellers. One of these, Tales from Ovid (1997), was the last but one collection published before his death by the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, to be followed by Birthday letters (1998), poems written to his wife Sylvia Plath over the decades following her suicide. The juxtaposition has a certain irony. Birthday letters, addressed to one of the heroines of modern poetry, is written in a confessional mode that caters to a continuing post-Romantic craving for a literature of sincerity and truth to life. Tales from Ovid reworks the most self-consciously fictive poem of a white male poet, dead for almost two millennia. His works were to become a byword for a playful detachment from the serious business of life, and as a result went into a critical eclipse during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries.

Life, it might be said, caught up with the poet when Ovid was sent into exile on the shore of the Black Sea in ad 8. Thereupon he did turn to a plangent self-expression in the verse letters from exile. But even so Ovid could not win, for these confessional works in the first-person singular were for long dismissed as inferior; their repetitive self-obsession was not read sympathetically as the history of a soul in pain, but taken as an index of Ovid’s expulsion from the fertile garden of poetic feigning.