Gebir - Walter Savage Landor

Gebir by Walter Savage Landor / ISBN 9781955190602 / small 212-page paperback from Sublunary Editions *** “Have you seen a poem called Gebir? It is the miraculous work of a mad man. Its intelligible passages are like flashes of lightning at midnight.” - Robert Southey, Letter to William Taylor First published in 1798 when Walter Savage Landor was twenty-four years old, Gebir is the poetic reinvention of the medieval Arabian legend of Jubair, founder of Alexandria. When the Iberian prince Gebir invades Egypt in order to rebuild the city of his ancestors, he immediately falls in love with its Queen Charoba. Supernatural forces thwart his every attempt to rebuild, and he must descend to the underworld before fulfilling his tragic destiny. Structured in seven books, the poem melds elements of heroic idyl, romance, tragedy, and pastoral. This volume reproduces the revised, extensively footnoted text of 1803, and also the related epic poems “Crysaor” and “The Phocæans” of the same period. "C