In Classical Odes , Nicholas Hagger achieves a blend of poetry and history, of the traditions of Herodotus and Pausanias (both of whom visited classical sites) and of Virgil and Horace (who wrote of everyday life in the countryside). In the first four-book Odes since Horace , he addresses the concerns regarding Western civilisation of Pound, Eliot and Yeats - particularly, the concern Eliot had about the impact of Europe on the man of letters - and finds a new way of carrying them forward. He catches the mood of our time: dismay at the end of the Great Britain of Churchill and Montgomery, elegiac feeling that Englishness is being superseded by Europeanness and globalism, and Britain’s hesitant fumblings for a new identity in a time of transition. Never before has Western’s civilization’s cultural legacy been captured in verse that has such contemporary relevance.