The Hundredfold

The Hundredfold is a tapestry of hymns, monologues, and short lyrics knit together as one book-length poem in praise of Christ in his startling humanity. Using all the riches of the English poetic tradition—meter, rhyme, music—the poet ponders the mysterious man from Nazareth and the world he came to set on fire with splendor.

Having made a career of translating the Italian masters Dante and Tasso, Anthony Esolen puts on the dusty mantle of such English craftsmen as Donne, Milton, and Hopkins in his first book of original contemplative poetry. The Hundredfold contains dramatic monologues set in first-century Greece and Palestine; lyrical meditations on creation, longing, failure, modern emptiness, and unshakeable hope; and twenty-one brand-new hymns, set to such traditional melodies as "Picardy" and "Old One-Hundred-Twenty-Fourth".

The book includes an introduction with diamond-sharp insights about English poetic forms at a time when form is so often misunderstood, if not dismissed. It provides an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and poets themselves, as well as those who read poetry for pleasure.