This is the first collection of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigal and song texts published in parallel Italian and English versions. Denis Steven's unique anthology ranges across four centuries of verse for music. More than thirty poets, old and new, famous and obscure, are represented here, many for the first time in English. Enthusiasts and scholars of the music and its period will be extremely interested in finding out what the poems Monteverdi set to music really mean. The keys Stevens uses in his translations come from a lifetime's work devoted to Monteverdi and his contemporaries.