SOURCE: "Characteristics of the New Poetry," in The Catullan Revolution, Melbourne University Press, 1959, pp. 44-69.

[Below, Quinn examines the features of what he terms "the Catullan movement" in classical Roman literature, focusing upon the poetry of youth and reaction, meter and structure, and the language of Catullus and the poetae novi.]

DID THE POETAE NOVI FORM A SCHOOL?

One piece of significant biographical information that emerges clearly from the Catullan poems is that their author was one of a group deeply interested in poetry. It is tantalizing to know so little of Catullus' relationships with his fellow revolutionaries and his stature among them. The common view is that there existed a clearly recognized school of poetae novi, its most prominent members (after Catullus) being the orator Licinius Calvus and the minor politician Helvius Cinna. Cinna's Zmyrna is praised by Catullus in 'Poem 95', and the name of Calvus is linked by him with the discussion of the new poetry in two of the four poems where his name is mentioned—'Poem 14', and especially 'Poem 50'. Only small crumbs of their verse survive. Others usually reckoned among the poetae novi and mentioned (probably) by Catullus are Cornificius, Valerius Cato and Furius Bibaculus. We have only a line or so of Cornificius and most likely nothing at all of Cato, though some ascribe to him the authorship of the Dirae of the Virgilian Appendix. Furius Bibaculus, however, is in some ways the best represented of the lot: in addition to a handful of fragments we have two complete poems, the longer extending to eight lines. Both poems unfortunately are confined by their subject, literary gossip, to a level of intent that makes them of little value as a guide to what Furius may have achieved when he was really trying. Catullus asks Cornificius for some verses to comfort him in 'Poem 38'. The Cato of 'Poem 56' could be Valerius Cato. The Furius of Poems '11', '26', '23' and '26', also referred to in 'Poem 24', is likely to be Furius Bibaculus; the usual interpretation of these poems, that Catullus is attacking this Furius, is perhaps the result of looking at them somewhat uncritically: exaggeratedly abusive language is not uncommon among friends, particularly if they are of Catullus' violent temperament, and there are hints in the Furius poems, and in other violent poems, that the abuse was not meant to wound—as it clearly was meant to in other poems, for example '28', '29', '47', or '59'. Then there is the Caecilius of 'Poem 35' (not otherwise known); nor is it unreasonable to imagine that common interests in poetry, as well as in what Horace calls 'iuuenum cures et libera uina', linked Catullus with the Flavius of 'Poem 6' (otherwise unknown); the Varus of 'Poem 10' (various candidates proposed); the book-loving Don Juan, Camerius, of Poems '55' and '58B' (who may have been Cornificius' brother-in-law, but is otherwise unknown); and others besides. The only new poet of whose work fragments survive, but who is not named by Catullus, seems to be Ticidas. We need not, of course, doubt that many more existed of whom we know nothing.

Three passages of Cicero are customarily used to prove that the existence of a school was recognized by a contemporary.… [One of these] comes from a letter written to Atticus at the end of the year 50 B.C. The letter begins:

  Brundisium uenimus VII Kalend. Decembr. usi
tua felicitate nauigandi; ita bella nobis
  Flauit ab Epiro lenissimus Onchesmites.…

The term 'neoteric', often applied by modern scholars to the new poets, owes its origin to this passage. The neoteric flavour of Cicero's hexameter is usually supposed to reside only in the spondaic fifth foot, but the line has a lot of the ring of Catullus' 'Poem 64' about it stylistically, as well as metrically. The five-word hexameter is frequent in 'Poem 64'. So, too, is the trick of the learned name: Onchesmites is the wind that blew from Onchesmus in Epirus towards Italy (Horace's Iapyx). Compare (on all these points) line 28 of 'Poem 64':

tene Thetis tenuit pulcerrima Nereine.

Both here and in line 395 the epithet chosen by Catullus (Nereine may not be right) is so obscure that the manuscript tradition has been confused.

The third quotation contains another term much used by modern critics, poetae novi. It deals with the dropping by these poets of the old licence that allowed a final 's' before an initial consonant to be disregarded metrically:

Quin etiam, quod iam subrusticum uidetur, olim autem politius, eorum uerborum, quorum eaedem erant postremae duae litterae quae sunt in oplimus, postremam litteram detrahebant, nisi uocalis insequebatur. Ita non erat ea offensio in uersibus quam nunc fuguint poetae noui. Sic enim loquebamur:

  qui est omnibu' princeps
non omnibus princeps, et:
  uita illa dignu' locoque
non dignus.

Cicero need not, of course, be pointing to anything more than a difference in practice between contemporary poets and older poets in general. This view is consistent with Cicero's own practice, as far as we can judge from the fragments of his verse. The device occurs only in his earliest verse. He seems therefore to have already abandoned it before Catullus began writing. Any special colour that we read into the phrase poetae novi can only come therefore from our associating this passage with the other two.

The view that a school existed has been strongly attacked. It seems that whether there was a clear-cut 'school', and whether its members were commonly referred to as the poetae novi or the neotori, are matters that must, at least, remain in doubt. (We need not for that reason avoid the convenient term poetae novi which modern use has made familiar.) It should be noted, incidentally, that none of the quotations from Cicero comes from a work written during Catullus' lifetime. The earliest (the letter to Atticus) was probably written several years after Catullus' death, and the other two are four to five years later still. The existence of a clear-cut Catullan school in the formative years of Virgil and Horace is, of course, an exciting possibility and fits in well enough with the view that Calvus (who died, probably, in 47 B.C.) and Cinna (who was assassinated, probably, in 44 B.C.) were members of it. Our concern here, however, must be not with the state of affairs in the middle forties, but with a period twenty to twenty-five years earlier, at the outbreak of the Catullan revolution.

Even if the existence of some sort of school is admitted, there is nothing to indicate that Catullus was its head. His relationship in terms of leader and disciple to the poets he names is undeterminable. Some hold the leader was Valerius Cato, basing their view on a passage in Suetonius, where Cato is called peridoneus praeceptor and an epigram quoted which is usually attributed to Furius Bibaculus, where Cato is clearly regarded as an authority on poetry, though it is not clear whether in the phrase 'solus legit ac tacit poetas' facit means 'rightly evaluates' or 'establishes the reputation of. Valerius Cato is lavishly praised by other poetae novi, but, unless he did write the Dirae, we have no way of testing their judgments. Even if he wrote little of any worth, this would not be the only instance known of a critic directing tyrannically a new poetic movement, though himself an indifferent poet

Still less determinable is to what extent these shadowy figures took their poetry seriously. Did their work possess only the elegant triviality of Laevius, or was it pervaded with the new spiritual atmosphere that wrenched the nugae away from the level of scholarly persiflage and their longer poems from the level of erudite dullness up to the level of front-rank poetry?

What should be incontestable (though it has been contested is that Catullus wrote, and discussed with other poets in poems that are extant (e.g. Poems '14', '22', '35', '36', '50', '65', '95', '116'), a kind of poetry that had certain highly novel overall features. Wrongheadedness and formalism have in the past sometimes obscured this truth, though it is today more generally admitted. Catullus and his friends must, of course, have had some realization of where they were heading, though, once again, the distant critic may have a clearer view of the contours of the terrain—clearer certainly than many contemporaries, clearer perhaps than the poets had themselves.

Despite these unresolvable uncertainties, Catullus' own poems make it clear that he was one of a group of poets who shared confidences, aspirations and ideas about poetry and literary criticism. It is also clear that these ideas had a permanent influence on Roman poetry. Inevitably we must try to guess at their shape from the surviving work of the one poet about whose poetry we really know anything. It is difficult to make any sure critical assessment of the surviving fragments of the other new poets, but there is a good deal in them all the same to suggest that, in both tone and style, they were close to Catullus.

THE POETRY OF YOUTH AND REACTION

Beginning a recent discussion on Catullus, a French scholar, J. Bayet, sets out from an overall generalization about the contours of the new movement (as we should, perhaps, call it in order to avoid the word 'school'). It was, he says, 'un phenomene de jeunesse.… Des jeunes gens, peu nombreux, instruits, curieux, … complices … contre la generation precedente, celle de Ciceron'. The first factor—youth with its independence, its recklessness, its singleness in enthusiasm—emerges clearly from the poems. Catullus himself tells us he had just assumed the toga of manhood when his first experiences of love came—and he began writing:

tempore quo primum uestis mihi tradita pureest,
  iucundum cum aetas florida uer ageret,
multa satis lusi: non est dea nescia nostri,
  quae dulcem curis miscet amaritiem.
('Poem 68', 15-18)

There was the time when I had just been
   given my plain white toga.
I was the age to feel like the flowers do that
   are filled with the joy of spring.
I took my fall share of life's fun. My name is
   well known to the goddess
who concocts the bitter-sweet anguish of love.

Bayet's second point, that the Catullan movement was a movement opposed to Cicero and his generation, may be restated more elaborately. Because of Cicero's long life and Catullus' short one, we tend to lose sight of the fact that the poet was something like twenty to twenty-five years younger than the orator. In terms of poetic tradition, it is the representatives of the epictragic stream that Cicero valued highest among Roman poets and it was their style he had himself followed and in some technical matters improved. Cicero is sometimes supposed to have passed through a neoteric phase himself. It is certainly possible, though we may suspect he was too old before the movement began. Aratus (whom Cicero translated) was an Alexandrian, but an interest in his learned didactic poetry did not necessarily make Cicero an adherent of the new movement taking shape in Rome in Cicero's own time. If we look at the Catullans in terms of personalities, then Bayet is clearly tight. But we should remember that the enmities and friendships of good poets are more transitory than their poetry. If, therefore, we try to think instead in terms of the evolution of the Roman poetic tradition, we should perhaps say the generation of Cicero placed highest the epic-tragic stream of that tradition, whereas Catullus represents a fusion of the three streams of tradition that reached him.

THE POETRY OF CATULLUS: ITS UNDERLYING UNITY

But it is time we passed from the poets themselves and their attitudes to an examination of some of the distinctive qualities of what they wrote. In the previous chapter, I tried to show the shallowness of the view that there are two Catulluses ('learned' and 'lyric'), and to substitute for that notion the notion of levels of poetic intent. The notion of levels of intent, however, if left unqualified, tends to suggest a disintegrated, discontinuous view of Catullus' poetry. We need a formula to tune our thinking, to give us some feeling for the overall shape of the new poetry and what was new in it. We can get this, perhaps, by lifting a phrase from a recent study of a single poem. J.-P. Boucher, seeking such a formula in order to integrate 'Poem 64' with the remainder of Catullus' work, calls it the kind of poetry where 'la sensibilite du poete est engagee'. Catullus is not a professional poet or a dilettante, he says, but a writer whose personal reactions are involved in the story he tells in 'Poem 64', and it is these reactions that dictate the whole layout of the poem. It is not simply that Catullus lets us feel he cares about Ariadne. We are made constantly to feel the presence of the poet by the way in which he directs the story, altering its tempo, imposing on stylized ancient legend an ironical overlay of modern realistic detail, giving the poem constantly. the imprint of his own personality.

This personal involvement of the poet is something new that the Roman temperament brought to ancient poetry at this stage. The Greeks were capable of the acutest analysis of passion and able to frame it in high poetry. The Hellenistic poets exploited deliberately and obviously clever arrangement and layout of a poem.

But about both ages of Greek literature there was always something external and intellectual. Even when Hellenistic poetry introduced the fashion of writing in the first person, a coldness, a withholding of self persisted. Any wholesale condemnation of Greek literature for its impersonal character would obviously be absurd. It results in some departments of literature in a nobility and an objective purity the Romans never matched. Its limitations only appear when Hellenistic poets start writing of themselves.

One notices the same intrusion of the personal when one compares Roman sculpture with Greek. Catullus, like Keats, was a barbarian who so transformed the raw material of his own life in his poetry that it attained heroic stature, and who contrariwise experienced the excitement of personal involvement in re-creating what a modern poet has called approvingly

legends that strut in verses out of the past,

because the stuff of legend has an organized tension about it that the rawer material of contemporary life seems to the poet to lack.

Interaction between the elements of self and legend is constant. The long poems are vitalized by this feeling of participation, the short poems are often thereby made to soar from the level of conversation improved upon (when urbanity and sophistication are the predominant qualities of the verse) to the level of very real poetry by a single evocative phrase. This need not involve straightout employment of mythological material—rare in Catullus, compared with the elegiac poets. As an example of how the unreal, romantic world surges up at the slightest touch, consider the effect of the two words candida puella in 'Poem 13':

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me
paucis, si tibi di fauent, diebus,
si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam
cenam, non sine candida puella
et uino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.

You'll dine in style, dear Fabullus, when you
   come to me,
any day now, if the gods are kind to you.
So long as you bring a good square meal
   along as well.
And don't forget that lovely fair-haired
   creature—
and a bottle of wine, some salt and a full
   supply of stories.

Into the narrow world of this elegantly worded invitation, in which pure form is at once the stimulus of genius and the justification of the poem as literature, is suddenly thrust the vision, heavy with overtones, of the radiant beauty of an unknown girl. Compare Catullus' use of the same word, applied to a woman, in 'Poem 35', 8, and especially 'Poem 68', 70 (mea candida diua), where he chooses this epithet at the moment when he likens his mistress to a goddess.

Consider also how much is built into 'Poem 7' while answering the question 'How many kisses are enough?' The question could have been treated on a purely intellectual plane of metaphysical wit—as it would have been if, for example, the opening two lines of 'Poem 7' had been followed by lines 7-13 of 'Poem 5', and that poem deprived of its lyrical overtones by removing lines 3-5. We should then have a poem like this:

Quaeris, quot mihi basiationes
tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque. ('Poem 7', 1-2)

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum,
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus inuidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum. ('Poem 5', 7-13.)

You ask me, Lesbia, how many kisses it will
   take
to make me really satisfied.
Give me a thousand kisses, followed by a
   hundred;
another thousand then, and a second hundred.
Then a further thousand, plus a hundred.
Finally, when we've made it many thousands,
please muddle all the accounts and forget the
   total.
Then no nosey nasty person will be able to be
   envious
through knowledge of such heavy transacting
   in kisses.

This combination of the more purely intellectual parts of two poems would have given us a perfectly acceptable non-lyric, non-imaginative epigram. Instead in 'Poem 7' we have:

Quaeris, quot mihi basiationes
tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.
quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae
lasarpiciferis facet Cyrenis
oraclum louis inter aestuos
et Batti ueteris sacrum sepulcrum;
aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,
furtiuos hominum uident amores:
tam te basia multa basiare
uesano satis et super Catullo est,
quae nec pernumerare curiosi
possint nec male fascinare lingua.

You ask me, Lesbia, how many kisses it will
   take
to make me really satisfied.
As many as the sands of Libya's desert
that lies round Cyrene where the silfium
   grows,
stretching between the oracle of sweltering
   Jove
and the holy tomb of Battus long ago
   departed.
Or as many as the stars that in night's quiet
look down on as mortals stealing love.
That is the total of the kisses that will make
your passionate Catullus really satisfied.
A sum like that the nosey couldn't reckon up,
or evil tongues weave spells around.

The poem is laden with the qualities that controlled imagination can impart. Jove's ancient shrine in the sweltering desert. The magic of night that Virgil re-caught in his

ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram.

But night's magic is always easily evoked and it would have been a blemish in so short a poem to use as a second image of countless number a thing so commonplace—if it had not been given special appropriateness. The lyric and imaginative impulse is strengthened, therefore, by our sharing with the poet the thrill of an ironical reference to the poet's own furtiuus amor with Lesbia.

The term controlled lyricism may serve to label what is going on in this poem and others like it (for example, 'Poem 31' …). The lyrical impulse is tightened by an intellectual awareness of significance and proportion, which controls, and organizes what is said. Even in the poems of completest surrender to emotion we can have the feeling that Catullus is aware of the course the poem must take if it is to remain the sort of poem this tension between intellect and emotion best produces. Contrast the surrender to the lyric impulse in Tibullus and his uncritical acceptance of emotion. Poetry can be written the Tibullan way, too, but its characteristic will be charm rather than strength. In Horace and Ovid, on the other hand, the intellect has a sort of non-engage effect, framing the emotional vignette that teach ode or elegy constitutes, suggesting a judgment (often, in Horace, of a scene involving others and not, on the surface, personal at all) and a point of view.

This is perhaps the point for a word about 'sincerity'. The common view rightly stresses the sincerity of Catullus' poetry, but tends to confuse poetic sincerity with autobiographical truth. The following judgment on poetry, for example, would, I think, still win ready acceptance among many students of classical literature, not only for the eloquence with which it is expressed:

the Lesbia cycle cannot be paralleled in ancient literature for sincerity of passion, passing through all the stages of joyous contentment, growing distrust, and wild despair to the poignant adieu of the disillusioned lover.

Few modern literary critics, however, would accept the doctrine of Dichtung und Wahrheit in so ingenuous a form. They would deny that sincerity of this sort is vital to good poetry. And, conversely, that Catullus' poetry must be good because it seems to record authentic experience. Sincerity, like other forms of emotion, is no more than an ingredient of poetry, essential to securing the temperature of fusion of the poet's raw material into poetry. It is at best a poor criterion of quality, and its relationship to factual truth is complicated. A measure of insincerity even is not incompatible with good poetry, though in Roman poetry we have to wait till Horace for the studied exploitation of attitudes so complex in the poet to his subject-matter.

METRE AND STRUCTURE

Another characteristic of the new poetry is its exploitation of the possibilities of metrical variety. The course of the old Roman tradition here has already been indicated, from the cantica of Plautus through the polymetric nugae of Laevius. In the poetae novi this is first and foremost a matter of intense interest in metrical experiment. The excitement it could produce in Catullus is dear from 'Poem 50':

Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi
multum lusimus in meis tabellis,
ut conuenerat esse delicatos:
scribers uersiculos uterque nostrum
ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc,
reddens mutua per iocum atque uinum.
atque illinc abii tuo lepore
incensus, Licini, facetiisque,
ut nec me miserum cibus iuuaret
nec somnus tegeret quiete ocellos,
sed toto indomitus furore lecto
uersarer, cupiens uidere lucem,
ut tecum loquerer simulque ut essem.
at defessa laboret membra postquam
semimortua lectulo iacebant,
hoc, iucunde, tibi poema feci,
ex quo perspiceres meum dolorem.
nunc audax caue sis, precesque nostras,
oramus, caue despuas, ocelle,
ne poenas Nemesis reposcat a te.
est uehemens dea: laedere hanc caueto.

The poem ends with an elaborately pathetic entreaty for another meeting. Licinius Calvus is to be supposed as receiving the poem first thing the next morning. This becomes clearer if we change the past tenses in the second half to presents it was common in Latin letters for the writer to adopt in matters of time the standpoint of the recipient. Indeed 'yesterday' in the first line, by our conventions, should perhaps be 'today' though we may keep 'yesterday' for convenience and assume the poem was written after midnight. Two further points should be noted: the way in which Catullus consciously suggests the tone of a love-letter, even in details of vocabulary (e.g. miserum; dolorem) in order to convey an intellectual or artistic excitement that is as acute as sensual excitement; and the degree to which this ostensibly spontaneous poem has been arranged for publication, by sketching in the circumstances in the opening lines—Calvus did not need to be told what Catullus tells him. The poem is more complex than might at first appear.

How well spent, Licinius, the idle hours of
   yesterday!
I'd my notebook with me and we had glorious
   fun,
sophisticated by arrangement.
Each of us took his turn at versifying,
gaily experimenting with metre after metre,
vying with the other while we joked and
   drank.
I left for home, fascinated,
Licinus, by the elegance of your wit.
My dinner gave me no comfort. I was in a
   torment.
Nor could sleep lid my eyes or bring me rest.
Gripped by excitement I cannot tame, I've
   been tossing
all around my bed, impatient for the day,
hoping we can be together and I car' talk with
   you.
Finally, exhausted with fatigue, extended
on my bed, half-way now to death,
I've made, dear friend, this poem for you,
so you can understand the torture I've been
   through.
Take care, please do not be foolhardy;
do not say No, dearest friend, to my request,
lest avenging Nemesis exact her retribution.
Don't provoke the goddess. She can be
   violent.

The fascination that metrical problems have for front-rank poets is hard, perhaps, for those of us who are not poets to understand. We have still to resist a tendency to equate interest in technique with inferior genius—a carry-over of the romantic doctrine of lyrical inspiration. Though, rather curiously, it is more fashionable to disparage Horace for a preoccupation with metre than Catullus. Yet the importance attributed to metre by leading poets today is easy to gather from their readiness to discuss this and other aspects of technique, and from the confessions poets occasionally make to us about their methods of composition. In Roman literature these enthusiasms for technique were novel. The old craftsman-poet was conservative and rightly so, because cleverness: was not his business. Cleverness that went beyond the very occasional special effect would thrust the personality of the artist into the work of art, and in epic and tragedy the artist should remain anonymous.

All the same, the way in which the short poems of Catullus fall into two groups is remarkable: Poems '1' to '60' are written numero modo hoc modo illoc, but Poems '69' to '116' are all in elegiacs. As far as we can tell, Catullus practiced the two genres simultaneously, not at any stage abandoning either for the other as his successors did: the polymetric poems prepared the way for the Epodes and the Odes of Horace, the elegiac poems for Augustan elegy. In Catullus, the subject-matter of both genres is often the same, though the treatment of it is usually very different, except at the lowest level of intent where an abusive epigram in hendecasyllabics may not differ greatly from an epigram in elegiacs. On the higher levels of composition, the polymetric poems display greater surges of emotion, more spontaneous writing we may say—provided by spontaneous we mean an effect of art, and do not suppose spontaneity to exclude long preparation—or structural complexity. The elegiacs are less exuberant in their wording, though they often display a restrained ferocity. There are elements of tradition latent in this distinction, though not enough to make it clear why Catullus chose to develop the distinction so sharply.

Coupled with metrical experiment is a new attention to structural problems. In epic poetry the canvas is so vast that the quality of the structure is less important. In the drama and in the didactic poetry of Lucretius, there is necessarily an overall layout of the material, but nothing approaching the structural tightness that a good short poem must have. In Catullus, the qualities of concision and slickness are so apparent that it is hardly necessary to quote examples from the short poems. Even in the longest poems, e.g. '64' and '68', there is a new attention not only to overall structure, but, instead of a loose string of purple passages, an effect of carefully calculated contrast (e.g. in 'Poem 64' between description of scene and direct speech), as well as studied exploitation of the unexpected angle and of the diversity of layout in description, extremely detailed description contrasting sharply with succinct resume. In structure, too, the polymetric poems and the elegiac poems differ, the latter displaying a more closely knit logical sequence of thought, as opposed to the cyclic effect that we get—often in the polymetric poems, where a single idea is enunciated, expanded, and then reiterated.

LANGUAGE

With the new poets came a remarkable renovation in the language of Roman poetry. The language of serious poetry, that of epic and tragedy, had really changed very little since the days of Ennius. An effective poetic style (and Ennius was that) tends, once formed, to persist until its remoteness from living language deprives it of vitality to a degree that is felt to be intolerable and to make it unfit for the effective expression of any sincerely felt emotion.

Differences between the two kinds of poetic language are obvious. Though of course there are common features. Catullus keeps, for example, in his more serious writing (in Poems '63' and '64', in the more seriously intended elegies) to the rugged, highly alliterative style which goes back to the very origins of Roman poetry. Unfortunately, apart from studies of points of detail, little has been done to investigate the differences adequately—or the relationship of epic language and Catullan language to other Roman poetic styles. Moreover, the usual approach is based on an ancient grammatical tradition that treats the language of poetry as merely the vehicle of the sense—as though there existed first a body of material to be communicated which is then wrapped in a garb of poetic language. Any good poetry is more than this sort of product of versifying ideas. Such an approach becomes, however, hopeless when we have to deal with the intensely cohering compositions of the poetae novi, where every detail of word, sound and metre, and the organization of these into an integrated whole, are active constituents of the poetry. Though this is almost a commonplace of modern literary criticism, it is perhaps worth reiteration here.

The new climate in literary criticism is, of course, the outcome of changes in the way poetry has been written in our time. The nature of the phenomenon with which we have to deal in Catullus can be more readily understood, therefore, today than fifty years ago as a result of the comparable renewal that we have seen in the language of poetry in our own literature. The similarity between the two movements is at least sufficient to make it worth taking advantage of the acuter feeling we necessarily possess for our own language in order to get some feeling for what happened with the poetae novi.

The source of these renovations when they occur is the living, everyday language. In Roman literature, the elements of a style drawing upon everyday speech already existed in the comic-satiric stream of tradition. What the poetae novi had to do was to adapt the racy directness of speech so that it could be used for serious poetry. The degree of adaptation depended on the level of poetic intent. The colloquialism of Catullus is, of course, well recognized by scholars, though it is seldom adequately represented by Catullus' many translators in recent years. Indeed the gulf that separates the poetae novi from their Alexandrian 'models' is perhaps deepest here. The diction of Hellenistic poetry is, by comparison, an odd jumble of worn, pretentious literary archaism. Despite the many technical achievements of that brilliant movement, we see here a symptom of disease, the result of making poetry in a kind of literary laboratory.

Of course, even at the lowest levels of intent the new poetry, like the dialogue of Oscar Wilde's comedies, contains a great deal of artistic improvement upon the conversation of the most brilliantly sophisticated set. In Catullus, the language of conversation is improved upon in two directions. Firstly, as in Wilde, by a heightened tension, giving the appearance, still, of naturalness, but bringing about a sustained brilliance which is the effect of art. Quite apart from metre, we may be sure the poetae novi never talked in this way. This improvement upon conversation is so straightforward we need not do more than mention it, as a warning against those who put the case for colloquialism too simply. It cannot, alone, make poetry out of speech. If we are to get the right feeling for Catullus, we must grasp a second way in which his language (despite its colloquial raciness), by a subtle infiltration of the unobtrusively archaic, the unusual and even the exotic, assumes the evident tone, the solemnity almost, that serious poetry requires. Again, a look at modern poetry may help us to get our bearings. Let us take Robert Graves's poem 'The Cool Web' as an illustration of one kind of poetic language, concentrating our attention on that aspect only:

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening
   sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fight.

There's a cool web of language winds as in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession;
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death
   comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

There is hardly a detail in this poem of which we could say that it belonged to literature only and not to living language. Even the omission of the relative pronoun in the first line of the third stanza occurs in colloquial language, in addition to its regional and archaic overtones. There are whole lines that we might without difficulty use in conversation. Yet, quite apart from the obvious structural qualities of the poem: the incantatory effect, for example, of the patterns of repetition (remember what prominent features anaphora and circular composition are of Catullan style); quite apart from the special exploitation of certain words (the deliberate ambiguity of 'spell' for example, the personifying effect of applying the epithet 'cruel' to a rose's scent, or the unusual syntax of 'dumb to say'); apart from all these apparent devices, the poem is pervaded by both a tightness of tone and a solemnity that make it quite unlike prose. And this is a comparatively neutral example, because we have chosen a poem which contains no dialogue.

Stylistic comparisons between any modern poet and an ancient one should not be pushed too far, though most of the devices in this poem could, I think, be paralleled from Catullus. What we want from Graves's poem is an overall impression of style to tune our reactions to Catullus. Almost any Catullan poem that is more than a few lines long can make us feel the power a comparable crispness of diction possesses to create the atmosphere of poetry. The effect is discreetly heightened by the unusual turn of phrase or word. The alternation of colloquialism and elaborate polysyllable should particularly be noted.

The most instructive poems are those whose raw material (that which becomes the subject-matter when the poem has been made) provides no obvious poetic impulse. Consider what Catullus does with the situation he deals with in 'Poem 6':

Flaui, delicias tuas Catullo,
ni sint illepidae atque inelegantes,
uelles dicere nec tacere posses,
uerum nescio quid febriculosi
scorti diligis hoc pudet fateri.
nam te non uiduas iacere noctes
nequiquam tacitum cubile clamat
sertis ac Syrio fragrans oliuo,
puluinusque peraeque et hic et ille
attritus, tremulique quassa lecti
argutatio inambulatioque.
nam nil stupra ualet, nihil tacere
cur? non tam latera ecfututa pandas,
ni tu quid facias ineptiarum.
quare, quidquid haloes bond malique,
dic nobis. uolo te ac tuos amores
ad caelum lepido uocare uersu.

The situation is a stock one the young man who won't produce his girl for inspection. Smartness and sophistication are the key-notes of the poem.

Flavius, you've a sweetheart, but she must
be just a bit uncouth, not entirely U perhaps,
or you'd want to talk of her, couldn't help it
   even.
I expect it's some baggage feverish for a man
that you're in love with, and ashamed of
   owning up.
They're no celibate nights you're passing.
   Your room,
though tongueless, shrieks its testimony just
   the same.
All those flowers, that oily Syrian scent,
those pillows crumpled just as much on either
   side,
that rickety bed, so knocked about it emits
falsetto creaks as it wanders round the room.
Not the slightest use refusing to talk.
Why, you're an obvious case of shagger's
   back.
There must be funny business going on.
So tell us who she is you've got—whether
   good
or bad. I want to poeticize your love and you
and raise you to the sky in polished verse.

To confine ourselves to diction: consider the contribution of the striking polysyllables febriculosi (with a deliberately coarse word juxtaposed), argutatio, inambulatio (two extravagant abstract nouns, that make up a line between them) and that of the personification implied by clamat or uiduas. Exuberant fantasy is allowed to run its delicious course, and then at the end the poem wheels round on to a more seriously poetic note: there is perhaps the stuff of poetry in this affair between Flavius and his mistress, and Catullus is eager to exploit it.

The atmosphere of a poem like this is difficult to create and Catullus is not always successful in his choice of language. Contrast the opening half of 'Poem 39':

Egnatius, quod candidos habet dentes,
renidet usque quaque. si ad rei uentum est
subsellium cum orator excitat fletum,
renidet ille; si ad pii rogum fili
lugetur, orba cum flet unicum mater,
renidet ille. quidquid est, ubicumque est,
quodcumque agit, renidet: hunc habet morbum,
neque elegantem, ut arbitror, neque urbanum.

Egnatius has got teeth that are shining white,
   and so breaks
on every conceivable occasion into a flashing
   grin. The prisoner's
in the dock. His counsel's working at our
   tears. Egnatius

breaks into a flashing grin. Or at a funeral:
   grief on every side
the mother who's bereaved laments her model
   son. Egnatius
breaks into a flashing grin. On every
   conceivable occasion,
no matter what he's doing, that flashing grin.
  It's a complaint he suffers from
and one that's neither smart, I think, nor
   sophisticated.

Here the attempt to transform prose statement by the structural force of repetition (e.g. the renidet ille, repeated at the same position in the line, the parallel cum clauses) somehow fails.

It is this effect which I have been calling crispness (to denote something that is fairly evident in illustration, but hard to analyse) that Havelock felt, perhaps, when he called these poems 'lyrical'. But even taken in this way, that term narrows too much the range of tone that we find in Catullus. Consider 'Poem 10', where this same crispness of language gives life to a poem where anything approaching emotional outburst is carefully held in check in order to achieve a mixture of narrative and urbane comment that was to prepare the way for the best hexameter writing of Horace. On the other hand, discreetly strengthened with some of the traditional devices of poetry, it contributes to the success of Poems '63' and '64'. Even in these long narrative poems, the straightout inflation of rhetoric and the artificial intensity of rhetoric are avoided—except in the set speeches (a prominent feature of both. poems), which acquire thereby a deliberately archaic, 'epic' tone with which the mannered slickness of the narrative sections is set in calculated contrast. Consider this passage of 'Poem 63':

ita de quiete molli rapida sine rabie
simul ipsa pectore Attis sue facta recoluit,
liquidaque mente uidit sine quis ubique fores,
animo aestuante rusum reditum ad uada tetulit.
ibi maria pasta uisens lacrimantibus oculis,
patriam allocuta maestast ita uoce miseriter.
'patria o mei creatrix, patria o mea genetrix …
ubinam aut quibus locis te positam, patria, reor?'
('Poem 63', 44-50, 55)

The narrative opening of this section, unadorned by traditional rhetorical devices other than alliteration, but drawing vigour from forceful, unconventional words, contrasts with the loose declamatory style of Attis' speech, which is almost a pastiche of tragic style:

Then, when after soft repose, free from
   madness' grasp,
Attis himself in mind reviewed kiss situation,
and with intellect cleared perceived where he
   was and what he lacked,
thought once more seething he returned to the
   water's edge,
and scanning with tear-brimmed eyes the
   ocean's vast extent,
pitifully addressed with sorrowing voice his
   native land:
'O land where I was conceived, land where I
   was born. …
where, in what place, shall I think you
   situate?'

A detailed analysis of Catullan language cannot, however, be attempted here, though there is urgent need both for intensive research into points of language that have never been looked at, and for bringing together the studies of detail that have been made, in order to give meaning to dry lists of words and points of syntax in terms of what poets really do. It is obviously not enough, for example, to say that diminutives are a feature of Catullus' style and give a list of them. It is still not enough to say their effect is colloquial. Take 'Poem 64', line 131:

frigidulos udo singultus ore cientem
with tearful face summoning chilly sobs

or line 316:

laneaque aridulis haerebant morsa labellis

and from the dried-up lips hang wisps of
   wool, bitten off.

In these contexts the diminutives have the power both to create pathos and to heighten the interpenetration of legend and reality that we have spoken of earlier.

The archaism of Catullus has been sometimes exaggerated. The language of his contemporary Lucretius is much more deeply penetrated with archaism. Nevertheless, archaic touches exist, producing, among other effects, simplicity and solemnity. And archaism is, of course, a constant device in Poems '63' and '64', where their strength comes largely from a basic archaism and non-naturalism of tone (emphasized by static, heavily detailed pictures: e.g. 'Poem 64', 52-70) given a fresh subtlety by gentle but conscious touches of ironical realism.

A more complicated clement of Catullan language is the employment of Greek words and constructions. Often Greek words (e.g. mnemosynum, pathscus, catagraphus, and, probably, strophium) are part of the sophisticated slang of the circle of the poetae novi. An example of a more complicated trick (the sort of thing we might associate more with Virgil than Catullus) is given by Ronconi:

nutricum tenus exstantes e gurgite cano
('Poem 64', 18)

In this line, use of nutrix for mamma probably depends on the reader's knowing that a Greek word for nutrix also means mamma.

Lastly, we may mention the Graecisms of syntax: the use of an accusative after a passive participle, for example,

non contecta leui uelatum pectus amictu,
non tereti strophio lactentis uincta papillas
('Poem 64', 64-5)

giving an effect that is novel, that draws upon the hearer's erudition. The sense in which this construction may be called a Graecism needs to be precisely stated. It should be obvious that a writer of any skill will not simply import from another language a wholly alien piece of syntactical idiom. The requirements are best met stylistically when the alien construction is comprehensible, offers positive advantage (freshness, concision), and is only just not normal syntax. For example, 'From the worth-nothing that he was he is become a personage' is a series of syntactical Gallicisms in English obvious to those who know French ('Du vaurien qu'il etait, il est evenu un personnage'), but offering stylistic possibilities whether this is recognized or not; whereas, say, 'I demanded of him how it did itself that this should be arrived' completely lacks these possibilities of stylistic exploitation. The same conditions apply to the stylistic exploitation of Greek syntax in Latin. In the case of the example quoted: there are traces of a middle past participle with a direct object in Latin from early times, just enough for the Greek construction to be understood and felt as a kind of Latin, unusual but effective. It therefore becomes possible to exploit the much greater use made in Greek of this construction and its affinity with the accusative of respect in Greek, a construction that is not Latin at all.

Another example from Catullus is his use of ut with the subjunctive in imitation of Greek σς, for example:

sed quid ego a primo digressus carmine plura
commemorem, ut linquens genitoris filia
   uultum,
ut consanguineae complexum, ut denique
   matris,
quae misera in gnata deperdita laetabatur,
omnibus his Thesei dulcem praeoptarit
   amorem:
aut ut uecta rati spumosa ad litora Diae
uenerit, aut ut eam deuinctam lumina somno
liquerit immemori discedens pectore coniunx?
('Poem 64', 116-23)

Once again what Catullus says is possible Latin, though the construction is much commoner in Greek, and the concentrated repetition of ut here could hardly fail to sound somewhat exotic. The normal Latin equivalent of the Greek construction is the accusative and infinitive, so that here there is the added advantage of conciseness, because we escape from the heavy prose construction.

Both these Graecisms caught on and are frequent in Augustan poetry. Others, like the use of the nominative and infinitive,

ait fuisse nauium celerrimus
('Poem 4', 2)

proved less popular.

These details of language, like the new attention to structure and the interpenetration of simple sense with elaborate imagery (as in 'Poem 7'), build up a picture of a movement about which two final generalizations are, perhaps, useful. Firstly, this is hard poetry—not for the general public, but for the lettered elite who have the culture needed to appreciate its subtleties and the enthusiasm for tracking them down. Secondly, it is the poetry of art for art's sake, the poetry of litterature pure. above all in its most serious productions at the highest level of intent (Poems '63', '64', '66'), but also in the nugae, the uselessness of which is deliberately emphasized. The antithetical force and the programmatic character of the words in 'Poem 1'

  namque tu solebas
meas esse aliquid putare nugas.

  For you used to think
these little scraps of verse had real worth.

are often missed. There is some evidence that in this matter of art for art's sake the poetae novi followed a conscious doctrine, provided mainly by Philodemus, the Greek philosopher and poet who lived in Italy and was a contemporary of Catullus. Philodemus was the theorist of a movement to launch a doctrine of the conscious uselessness of poetry.

Both innovations succeeded: Roman poetry remained 'hard', and Roman poets fought to maintain litterature pure, despite the efforts of patrons to put poetry again to the service of the community. This is true even of Horace. Despite the occasional high-quality engage political poem and his decision in the last years of his life to support a compromise (the famous omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci), Horace was, in his most creative years as a serious poet, on the whole an adherent of litteratare pure, just as much as he was, almost everywhere in the Odes, an adherent of 'hard' poetry.

On both counts, again, the parallel with our own day is close, and in both contexts we might ask ourselves at what point the heightened possibilities offered to poetry cease to outweigh the consequences of divorce from large sections of the educated public.