“What use is a new myth? What difference could it make to see the history of poetry through the lens of a fictive figure of Amphion, who builds cities with the power of song, rather than through that of Orpheus, whose song pits the power of individual desire against intractable fate? With impressively wide-ranging knowledge and profoundly deep learning, Middlebrook provides a resonant answer. Following Amphion as he appears in direct and fugitive ways, in poetic projects ancient and modern, across boundaries of language and culture, Middlebrook allows us to attend to poetry as an art that belongs to this world; invested and implicated—as we are—in projects of civilizational construction, critique, and renewal.”

Oren J. Izenberg, University of California, Irvine

“Amphion is a book worth savoring for its brilliant analysis of lyric modes, contexts, and forms. Amphion—the poetic builder whose lyre charmed the stones into creating the city-state of Thebes—is a central figure of the powers of poetry in culture. This book reminds us that Amphion is also a figure presupposing destruction and cultural déchirement: Middlebrook interrogates the place of poetry in times of discord, violence, and disruption. Although Amphion will be especially illuminating for early modernists, anyone interested in lyric poetry or in the place of the arts in the polis will find this book thought-provoking and relevant to our own cultural moment.”

A. E. B. Coldiron, Florida State University