“Roush here shows a solid command of preexisting scholarship by fellow campanellisti. . . . The poems can be gnomic, pithy, sententious, somewhat like the work of a Nostradamus without events. They are dense, sometimes puzzling, always challenging, but generally rewarding in that they repay the study that they have finally received in English at the able hands of Sherry Roush.”

Roy Rosenstein, American University of Paris, France | Sixteenth Century Journal

“The clear translations of Roush . . . convey deep metaphysical discontent. . . . A powerful, if sometimes harsh, thinker is herein revealed.”

Star-Ledger

“Tommaso Campanella cast his radical philosophy in dense verse, and this is a useful, congenial translation. Sherry Roush has supplemented this bilingual edition with scholarly notes; and the Introduction presents to the English reading audience a hitherto barely known philosopher-poet.”–Paul Richard Blum, Loyola University Maryland

Paul Richard Blum, Loyola University Maryland

“Campanella was a powerful, provocative, and immensely fertile Renaissance poet and thinker, most famous for his utopian City of the Sun and for his courageous defense of Galileo. He had an enormous and long-lasting influence on a wide variety of fields to the point of becoming indeed a cult figure for the Risorgimento and a lightning rod for Italian nationalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Truly encyclopedic in his interests, as a writer he is nonetheless often difficult and at times self-contradictory. Sherry Roush has risen to the challenging task of giving us a bilingual selection of his philosophical poems, and of his own authorial commentary on them, in prose renderings that are carefully wrought and eminently readable: she has captured much of Campanella’s voice in this, the first major engagement with his poetry in English.”

Michael J. B. Allen, University of California, Los Angeles

“In this precise translation, Sherry Roush recovers the idiosyncratic voice of Tommaso Campanella’s philosophical poetry, rendering it in a cutting modern idiom that catches the spirit of the original. While John Addington Symonds recast Campanella as a decorous writer for his Victorian readers, Roush provides us with a more authentic picture of the man whose poetry is probing, cantankerous, and sometimes coarse. With its helpful historical introduction and extensive notes—including Campanella’s own running commentary on his poems—this volume will introduce students, scholars, and general readers to the fullness of a daring intellectual and activist life lived in Calabria, Naples, Rome, and Paris, alongside Tasso, Bruno, Galileo, Urban VIII, and Cardinal Richelieu, among many others.”

Dennis Looney, University of Pittsburgh