Books by Michael Schmidt

Acclaimed literary historian Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today. He describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis.

A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt, The First Poets brings to life the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination. Starting with the legendary Orpheus and the possibly mythical Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, 'the dirty old man of poetry', to Theocritus, the father of pastoral; from Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff for love, to Hesiod, who claimed a visit from the Muses - the stories in The First Poets masterfully merge fact and conjecture into animated and compelling portraits of our cultural ancestors. 'Every poet should buy a copy of this book to keep on their bookshelves. And, when the occasion arises, they should throw it at the cynic who may try to ignore or demean them' Independent.

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Encompassing a range of genres, it is geographically and culturally boundless and influenced by great novelists working in other languages. Michael Schmidt, choosing as his travel companions not critics or theorists but other novelists, does full justice to its complexity.

What links their diverse voices is a common language: each poem, in its own way, adds to the resources of the medium and makes it new. The poems in this book are allowed to slip free of their moorings in the biography and history of the last century to create new spaces and times.