Carmen 65 and the Arrangement of Catullus' Poetry

Abstract

While the metrical arrangement of the Catullan corpus has seemed to many scholars too artificial and inartistic to have been the poet's own choice, this opinion is now being challenged, in part because recent studies have shown that the collections could have been included in one roll, orLiber, and thus may be read as a single structure. Critics increasingly have sought the principles of organization in thematic correspondences or in the formation of ‘cycles’ within the three metrical groupings. Current studies have focused on the resonances in and among the groups, and on the function (and identification) of the first and last poems of each section and of the corpus as a whole.Several scholars have suggested (although without unanimity in specifics, and for different reasons) that the three sections consist of poems 1-51, 61-64, and 65-116. Others (see Most, n. 3 below) argue that the long poems are arranged as a group, so that the corpus consists of the polymetrics, the long poems (61-68), and the short elegiacs (69-116). Any attempt to explain the arrangement of Catullus' poetry must address this controversy. One way to approach the problem is to examinec.65, the first poem in elegiac meter. While some studies note thatc.65 hints at a ‘new poetic consciousness in Catullus’ this richly textured piece is still dismissed as ‘merely a covering letter.’ The following discussion seeks to discover whether c. 65 does simply accompanyc.66, or whether, reflecting the themes and motifs of the preceding poetry, it implies an alteration in the poet's sensibility.