Adone

…a labour of 20 years, Adone (1623; definitive ed. by R. Balsamo-Crivelli, 1922; Adonis [selections]). Adone, an enormous poem (45,000 lines), relates, with many digressions, the love story of Venus and Adonis and shows the best and worst of Marino’s style. The best is found in brilliant passages, written in…

…and a long mythological poem, Adone (1623), in which the Ovidian myth of the love of Venus and Adonis, told by Shakespeare in 200 stanzas, is inflated by Marino to more than 8,000. Marino derived inspiration from the poetry of the late 16th century, but his aim—typical of the age—was…