A bilingual edition of the more than 300 sonnets, madrigals and other poems produced by Michelangelo over his long career. The poems reveal much of the artist's inner feelings about such universal themes as love, death and redemption.

One of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo's work as a poet has been unjustly ignored. This thorough introduction outlines the broad chronological evolution of the poems, includes the poetry in both the original Italian and in translation and explores the themes raised in the poems.

There is no artist more celebrated than Michelangelo. Yet the magnificence of his achievements as a visual artist often overshadow his devotion to poetry. Michelangelo used poetry to express what was too personal to display in sculpture or painting. John Frederick Nims has brought the entire body of Michelangelo's verse, from the artist's ardent twenties to his anguished and turbulent eighties, to life in English in this unprecedented collection. The result is a tantalizing glimpse into a most fascinating mind. "Wonderful. . . . Nims gives us Michelangelo whole: the polymorphous love sonneteer, the political allegorist, and the solitary singer of madrigals."—Kirkus Reviews "A splendid, fresh and eloquent translation. . . . Nims, an eminent poet and among the best translators of our time, conveys the full meaning and message of Michelangelo's love sonnets and religious poems in fluently rhymed, metrical forms."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch "The best so far. . . . Nims is best at capturing the sound and sense of Michelangelo's poetic vocabulary."—Choice "Surely the most compelling translations of Michelangelo currently available in English."—Ronald L. Martinez, Washington Times

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is universally celebrated as one of the greatest artists of all time, yet iconic Renaissance creator was also a prolific and gifted poet. The verses collected here are primarily devoted to love and religion. Intense and passionate, the love poems focus on two figures: Tommaso de Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna; with the sonnets and madrigals dedicated to de Cavalieri revealing a highly charged, homoerotic fervour - previously obscured in the original versions. Michelangelo's later religious poetry moves away from his earlier wordly concerns, while his letters provide a fasicnating insight into his fanily relations and day-to-day life as a working artist. The result is a revealing picture of one of the towering figures of the Renaissance.

The description for this book, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo, will be forthcoming.

Alienation, ecstasy, death, rebirth: in the poetry of Michelangelo, Donne, and d' Aubigne these archetypal themes make possible the ultimate formulation of new poetic symbolizations of self and world. As their poetry evolves from a primarily rhetorical towards a fully symbolic mode, images of loss of self (in ecstasy or in alienation), of death and rebirth, recur with increasing frequency and intensity. Whether the context is love poetry or religious poetry, the basic problem remains the same; love is the link between the two kinds of poetry. And love is indeed a problem for these three poets, since it involves the self in relation to the "other," the other being either God or another human being. Increasingly, the work of each poet centers on a need to analyze or abolish the gulf separating subject and object, self and other. The dominant mode of most of the three poets' work is neither rhetorical nor symbolic, but expressive. This transitional mode reveals the individual poet's most urgent concerns and conflicts, his sense of self in Its most isolated or burdensome, affirmative or struggling state. Under lying most of their poems is a profound self-consciousness - a heightened awareness of self as a powerful, separate entity, with a corresponding objectification of all reality outside of self. The Renaissance in general is a time of increasing individualism and 1 self-consciousness.