The Catullan Revolution

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The Catullan~olution BY

KENNETH SENIOR

QUINN

LECTURER

UNIVERSITY

MELBOURNE

IN CLASSICS

OF MELBOURNE

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

First published 1959 Printed and hound in Australia hy Brown, Prior, Anderson Pty Ltd 430 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, C.1 for M elhourne University Press Carlton, N.3, Victoria Registered in Australia for transmission hy post as a hook

London and New York: Cambridge University Press

To Gamby

Preface

T

book deals mainly with literary criticism. Its object is to assess in general terms the shape of a new movement in poetry that began in Rome around Catullus, and the impact of that movement on the subsequent course of Roman poetry. The two best books on Catullus in English are A. L. Wheeler's Catullus and th,,:Traditions of Ancient Poetry and E. A. Havelock's The Lyric Genius of Catullus. The first is now thirty years old, the other twenty, and both have been long out of print. What I have to say has benefited, I hope, from Wheeler's great learning, while my first interest in Catullus (like that of many others) owes much to Havelock, whose book, despite some reckless generalizations, contains much responsive and perceptive criticism. But a good deal has happened in Catullan studies in twenty to thirty years, and a great deal more has taken place in the world of literature in general to change the outlook and standards of the literary critic. It would have been easy to multipiy references. I have tried to keep mine to works that seemed particularly important, or on which I have drawn directly for views that seemed to me novel. The reader who wants some assistancein finding his way more deeply into the literature on Catullus may profitably consult two recent and fairly full bibliographies: that of R. G. C. Levens in Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship, edited by M. Platnauer (1955), and J. Granarolo's excellent article, 'Ouen sont nos connaissancessur Catulle1' in L'information Utteraire, l 956, pages 56-65, which is well worth the little trouble it may take to get hold of it. More abundant references, many of them worth following up, will be found in L. Ferrero's Un' introduzione a Catullo (1955). This book began to take shape in my Roman Personal HIS

PR.EFACE

Poetry Seminar at Melbourne and was written in Cambridge while I was Commonwealth Fellow of St John's College. I am grateful to past members of the Seminar for suggestions and the stimulus they provided, while my particular thanks are due to Professor C. 0. Brink, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, Professor Thomas Gould, Amherst College, Mass., Dr R. D. Gray, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Dr F. R. Leavis, Downing College, Cambridge, for their help and encouragement, and above all to Mr A. G. Lee, St John's College, Cambridge, for detailed and valuable criticism freely given. Finally, but not in the place of least honour, my wife, for her constant support and not inconsiderable collaboration. The text used for the quotations from Catullus is that of R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford, 1958, by kind permission of Professor Mynors and the Delegates of the Oxford University Press. For convenience, in one corrupt line (Poem 6, 12) I have printed a traditional conjecture. Robert Graves's poem 'The Cool Web' is reprinted by kind permission of Mr Graves from Collected Poems 19141947, published by Cassell and Co. K.Q. Melhourne February 1959

Contents I

THE

BACKGROUND

1

The Hellenistic Background - 4 The Roman Background - 5 Roman Poetic Tradition before Catullus II

THE

TRADITION

7

RE-SHAPED

III

LEVELS OF INTENT

IV

THE CHARACTERISTICS NEW POETRY

19 27

OF THE 44

Did the Poetae Novi form a School? - 44 The Poetry of Youth and Reaction-48 The Poetry of Catullus: Its Underlying Unity- 50 Metre and Structure - 55 Language - 58 V THE CATULLAN VI THE BEGINNINGS

EXPERIENCE OF MODERN

70 LYRIC

85

The Poet's Audience- 87 Meditative Lyric - 90 Formal Survivals: The A'ddressee-95 NOTES

101

INDEX

117