Gebir – Walter Savage Landor
Gebir by Walter Savage Landor / ISBN 9781955190602 / small 212-page paperback from Sublunary Editions
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“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. “Crysaor” is the story of the slaying of a mythical, Iberian giant-king by Neptune, the comeuppance for Crysaor’s avaricious and autocratic rule. “The Phocæans” is the tale of a refugee people displaced from Ionia by the invasion of Harpagus in the 6th century B.C. and sailing across the Mediterranean in search of asylum. All three poems are attacks on political tyranny, on “Circæan soul-dissolving monarchy”, and are suffused by Landor’s strong sense of republicanism. They are each set down in knotty, idiosyncratic blank verse. Also included in this volume are Landor’s prose “Postscript to Gebir” (1800/02), the short poem “Apology for Gebir” (1854), the prefaces to the three poems, and an introduction to the volume by Empyrean Series co-editor Jacob Siefring.
Praise for Walter Savage Landor
“A set of Landor’s collected works will go further towards civilizing a man than any university education now on the market.” —Ezra Pound
“Year after year the scholar must still go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant sentences,—for wisdom, wit, and indignation that are unforgettable.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“[Landor] had won for himself such a double crown of glory in verse and in prose as has been worn by no other Englishman but Milton”—Algernon Charles Swinburne
“But might not a man build a reputation on the basis of not being read?”—Thomas De Quincey
