Ovid may be the perfect poet for this type of treatment (a collection of selections from his works in English translation by [give or take a few] 75 translators ranging from Arthur Golding - who inspired Shakespeare - to Rolfe Humphries [the translator probably seen most frequently on the shelves of bookstores and used bookstores in recent decades, and who's work is highly regarded by the editors of this volume...) The ability to draw out separate stories (from the Metamorphoses) or speeches, etc. from his other works allowed the editors to present each translator in a more or less complete extract... (I was going to include selected lines from some of the translations I found charming, but they lose too much out of context...but if you're interested in lyric poetry - Elizabethan on up (though there are selections from before that) - it's a very enjoyable read...) Each of the translators has a little something written about him as-well-as having his work sort of rated in relation to all his peers over time... These intro's are as interesting to read as the selections themselves. This is a wonderful book if you have an interest in Ovid as well as a desire to read, say, Francis Beaumont's translation of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus from the Metamophoses or a Henry Fielding translation from the Art of Love... (There are 32 pages of selections from the hard-to-find Golding translation alone...)