Elegiac Poetry Research Articles

Latin lyric and elegiac poetry: an anthology of new translations

Latin lyric and elegiac poetry: an anthology of new translations

Invitación al matrimonio: en torno a un pasaje estaciano (Silv. I 2, 161-200)

This paper is a literary commentary of Statius’ Siluae I 2, 161-200 (a suasoria to love). The following points are discussed: structure, general and particular sources, stylistic devices and literary fortune. Statius’ primary source of inspiration was Vergil’s Aeneid IV 31-53 (Anna’s suasoria addressed to Dido). But he also elaborated on other cultural sources: a) stoic philosophy; b) rhetorical θέσις of subject eἱ γαμητέον; and c) amatory and elegiac poetry.

Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love Elegy

When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.

Discordant Muses

Quaeritis undeis a good opening for a book of theFasti(5.1). The question and answer form here exemplified is basic to the poem, even if in the classic Callimachean form from which Ovid draws his inspiration it is the poet who asks the questions – and this in fact happens with the exhortationdicitein line 7. But thisquaeritis undehas also, I believe, an allusive value: it opens another book of elegiac poetry, Propertius' second book, where it is the more remarkable as an opening in that as far as we know it is the earliest example of a direct address to the reader in Roman poetry.The purpose of this allusion becomes clear if we take a wider look at the two contexts. In the first elegy of his second book Propertius inserts a celebrated negation of theMusenweihe:non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantat Apollo (2.1.3)while Ovid, on the contrary, is just about to consult Calliope and her sisters. The allusion offers other points of interest if we consider the subsequent development of Propertius' poetics.

Alternae Voces—Again

There is a persistent tradition of reading Propertius 1.10, according to which the Gallus addressed by the poem is the elegiac poet, and the poem itself is a description, not, or not only, of Gallus and his girl in bed but of Propertius reading Gallus’ love elegy.1 In CQ 39 (1989), 561–2, James O'Hara suggests that the phrase ‘in alternis vocibus’ in Prop. 1.10.10 is a hint at amoebean verse, and as such may refer to the amoebean elegiac experiments by Gallus which Fairweather argues are represented by the Qasr Ibrim papyrus. This may well be right. I suggest, however, that the primary metaphorical meaning of ‘in alternis vocibus’ is ‘in your elegiac verse’. Oblique hints at such a reading can be found in Ross (above n. 1), who describes 9f as ‘an extremely suggestive couplet’, and Hinds, in his discussion of alternus as a programmatic term in Ovid, Fasti 4.484.

The Taoist Elegies of Ku K’uang

Tang Studies 7 (1989) The Taoist Elegies of Ku K'uang TERENCE RUSSELL UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA Sometime in A.D. 794 or 795, shortly after Ku K'uang a{£ , then aged seventy sui, had moved himself and his family into retirement at Mao Shan ~ ill ,hisyoung son died of an unspecified cause. The Yu-yang tsa-tsu ]I m _ tJl, which contains an early version of the legend surrounding this event, recounts the story in this way:1 Ku K'uang lost one of his sons who was seventeen sui. The son's soul roamed about in a formless state as if in a dream and did not depart from its home. Ku could not overcome his profound sorrow and so wrote a poem, which he intoned and then fell to weeping. The poem reads: An old man has lost his son At sunset his tears turn to blood But the old man is already seventy And the separation will not be long? His son heard this and was moved, so he vowed to himself that if he could immediately be reincarnated as a human being he should again be a son in Ku's household. After a few days he seemed to be taken by someone to a place where there was a person resembling a county magistrate who ordered that he be born again into the Ku household. Then he could not tell what was happening until he suddenly felt that he had regained consciousness. He opened his eyes and recognized that he was in his own room again. His brothers and relations were 1 Tang ts'ai-tzu chuan m;;t T 14, compo Hsin Wen-fang (Chih hai ed.), ch. 3, and T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi :;t:.>f m1lC (Peking: Chung-hua, 1981), 388.3091, also contain versions of this legend. 2 A longer and somewhat different version of this poem is contained in Ku K'uang's collected works. See CTS (Peking: Chung-hua, 1979),264.2931. I shall use the Peking, 1981 edition as the standard for texts of all poems except where otherwise indicated. 169 Russell: The Taoist Elegies of Ku K'uang crowded around at his side. It was only that he could not speak. This had been his birth ... 3 The story goes on to explain that the reborn son was Ku Feihsiung Ji'ti ~~ 1m, the most notorious of Ku K'uang's offspring, who followed in his father's footsteps in eventually retiring to live at Mao Shan after a career in public service.4 It is a charming story and very poignant. It would be worthy of our attention as a piece of fiction even if it existed in isolation from other literary and historical sources. But like much fiction, this account is based on fact. There is notice of this death given in more conventional historical sources. Ku K'uang also wrote three poems in memory of his son, including a piece from which the poem quoted in the Yu-yang tsa-tsu is clearly derived. In these poems Ku shows just how deeply troubled he was by the untimely passing of his son. He also articulates his ideas regarding his son's death and post-mortem existence. These ideas are at variance with the scenario created in the story quoted above on a number of points. It is clear from the longest of these poems that Ku K'uang did not believe that his son would be reborn into his own household. He imagined that he would achieve quite a different fate, a fate related to a well-defined set of religious beliefs to which Ku K'uang himself prescribed. This might not immediately strike us as a noteworthy state of affairs. We should find nothing remarkable in an elegy that invokes religious doctrine as a basis for a description of the supposed afterlife of the deceased. The fact is, however, that it is rare to find reference to posthumous destiny in the elegiac verse of the T'ang dYnasty,and rarer still to be provided with a vision so extensive as we find in the longest of Ku K'uang's elegies...

Celtic saga and the contexts of old English elegiac poetry

Les élégies en vieil-anglais sont des poèmes lyriques ou moraux, exprimant la souffrance, la solitude, le regret du passé, etc. L’auteur leur compare les poèmes gallois anciens conservés dans le Livre noir et le Livre rouge : ces poèmes se présentent comme des extraits de légendes (cycles de Llywarch Hen, de Heledd). Il est vraisemblable que les littératures anglaises et galloises ont connu un genre narratif destiné à la récitation, et mêlant prose et poésie.

Solon van Athene as ‘betrokke’ digter

Littérature engagée is an important component of contemporary literary creation and criticism. The present article examines this phenomenon in the surviving iambic and elegiac poetry of the Athenian statesman and poet, Solon (early 6th century B.C.), in order to offer comparative material to the modern student of the subject.

Studies in John Gower by Maria Wickert, and: John Gower’s Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations ed. by Peter G. Beidler

SWDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER that seem quite distant from those in which they are found in Langland's poem. Conversely, Psalm 14, which is one of Langland's favorites, receives scant attention-presumably because it was not a favorite of Augustine. It might seem petty to detail such objections if Goldsmith's instincts were better than her methodology,, but unfortunately she remains stead­ fast to her principles far too often. The results are the sort of incoherence I have described and some serious misreadings of tone and content (as with the discussion of Piers and the pardon). It is distasteful to have to register such strong disapproval of a book into which a considerable amount of honest research and thought have gone and to repudiate the efforts of a scholar as diligent and fair-minded as Goldsmith seems to be. Even so, candor requires admitting that the book is one that will only confuse novices and exasperate experts. ROBERT ADAMS Sam Houston State University MARIA WICKERT, Studies injohn Gower. Translated by Robert]. Meindl. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Pp. xiv, 249. $19.75 hardcover, $9.75 paper. PETER G. BEIDLER, ed., John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Ongina!Articles and Translations. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Pp. viii, 141. $19.75 hard­ cover, $8.25 paper. Studies in John Gower was the Habilitationsschrift of Maria Wickert (1915-59) at the University of Cologne, and was published by that institu­ tion's press under the title Studien zujohn Gower in 1953. The present volume is a translation into English of this valuable and-in 1953 particu­ larly-ground-breaking book. Wickert's primary subject is the Vox c!amantis, Gower's major work in Latin. That poem contains 10,265 lines of elegiac verse, modeled for the most part on Ovid. There are seven books, each with subdivisions and prose headings, as is Gower's manner; the first three have individual prologues also. As Wickert amply demonstrates, the 146 REVIEWS poem is an extremely intricate one, allusive, tough, and obscure by turns. Tackling it in 1953, roughly a decade before the first translation was published by Eric Stockton (The Major Latin Works ofjohn Gower [Seat­ tle: University of Washington Press, 1962]) and before John H. Fisher's watershed study of Gower's total output Uohn Gower: MoralPhilosopher andFriendofChaucer [New York: New York University Press, 1964]), was no light undertaking. It is hardly insignificant that after thirty years Wickert's study remains the only full-scale attempt to assess Gower's Latin. In every way this scholarly silence seems a pity, since the Vax clamantis is an important poem and one about which we would do well to learn more. Composed, it is thought, in the later 1370s but with subsequent additions and changes reflecting the tumultuous events of 1381 and later, the Vax is in Wickert's view a unique heterogeneity of forms skillfully crafted by Gower to advise the young King Richard II, to provide humankind with moral counsel (as is his obligation as a good Christian), to bring to light religious corruption, and-in what Wickert has termed the "Visio" partic­ ularly-to vilify the instigators of social unrest. Since this "Visio" was written quite likely while the heat of the Peasants' Revolt was still on him by a Kentishman living in London, the first book of the Vax clamantis offers us one of the few accounts by an intimately involved eyewitness. To the chagrin of various historians who have gone to the Vax seeking "facts," however, Gower's version of the revolt is emotive, expressionistic, and heavilyallegorized. Wat Tyler becomes a jaybird, SimonSudbury becomes the Trojan priest Hellenus, and other notables are transformed into as­ sorted animals and Trojans in a tortuous dream sequence whose best literary descendant is perhaps the "Nighttown" chapter in James Joyce's Ulysses. Wickert's analysis of this nightmare is learned and illuminating. She shows painstakingly that Gower's models for the "Visio" were less beast fable than prophetic poetry such as that of John of Bridlington and, of course, contemporary sermon practices. Wickert is also a reader of subtle sensitivity and...

Self-Expression in Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry

Self-Expression in Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry

The Elegiac Poetry of The Excursion

The Elegiac Poetry of <i>The Excursion</i>

Igbo elegiac poetry

Igbo elegiac poetry

Hidden Ground Within: Matthew Arnold's Lyric and Elegiac Poetry

Adjectival flurry modulates into a graver cadence, the slow march of substantives. Purged interiority belies the excitable blazon, revealing an identity independent of appearance and dress. In the same way, Arnold hopes that the buried life of men could pace itself, could find respite from the insistent, jarring rhythms of the modern world. Poetry, he thought, makes this recovery of a true pace possible, not by the gay and radiant exterior of language, but by the hidden ground within: procedures of self-recognition. Austere reflection puts one once more in possession of one's real identity; a premise most obviously pertinent to the subjective genres, poems where Arnold speaks in his own voice. Here, I shall discuss poems which he classified as or elegiac, categories that constitute one volume of the three-volume Poems published in 1885 (<the last collected edition to have the benefit of the poet's supervision2). My purpose will be to define the hidden ground of this lyric and elegiac poetry, the sense of person which it attempts to establish, concentrating on work written during the period 1849-1853.3 The work of that period, as well as including some of Arnold's best-known poems, seems to me to articulate a shared preoccupation with the buried life, and indeed to form a matrix which the later work modified but never abandoned. The adorned outside of the Muse is a definition imposed by the expectations of a public; its hidden ground can only be known by the collapse, the proven irrelevance, of such social demands. The 'thought found in poetry is private, occluded, a release from public expectations. Thus, Leon Gottfried has claimed that Arnold's 'characteristic poetic response to modernity was one of evasion, and that some of his most considered poems 'represent

Rhythmical Factors in Catullus 72, 75, and 85

CATULLUS' ELEGIAC VERSE is predominantly spondaic. He has dactyls in only 37 per cent of the variable feet (that is, in the first four feet of the hexameter and the first two of the pentameter), as against 44 per cent in Propertius, 48 per cent in Tibullus, and 57 per cent in Ovid.1 This being so, predominantly dactylic passages or couplets stand out, and invite the assumption that some special effect is intended. It is the purpose of this article to pursue this assumption with reference to three of the shorter poems. This may be purely a question of art, in that a good poet is likely to assimilate rhythm to content; but it may also be relevant to interpretation, as one of the keys to the tone or emotional level of passages where the tone or emotional level is in doubt. There are three couplets in Catullus, all of them in the longer elegies, where the variable feet are wholly dactylic, and various explanations can be offered for the dactylic rhythm in these three places.2 But I wish rather to concentrate on the most dactylic of the epigrams, namely poems 75 and 85.3 Each of these has dactyls in 67 per cent of the variable feet, which is almost twice as many as Catullus' average, and it seems reasonable to see this as significant. Now it would be generally agreed that these two poems are part of a sequence of poems which includes also poem 72, and that this sequence represents Catullus' attempt to express, or formulate, the conflict of emotions which is epitomized in the phrase odi et amo.4 So the obvious areas in which to look for an explanation of the

Tibulliana

I. I. 37–40 adsitis, diui, neu uos e paupere mensadona nec e puris spernite fictilibus.fictilia antiquus primum sibi fecit agrestispocula, de facili composuitque luto.The comma after pocula in line 40 is the accepted punctuation. But fictilibus in line 38 is a noun and the same word immediately repeated in a different case must naturally be taken by any reader as a noun too. Therefore comma after agrestis; the pentameter is then a line like 1. 3. 38 effusum uentis praebueratque sinum (for such displacement of -que see Platnauer, Latin elegiac verse, p. 91). The movement of thought is from generic fictilia to specific pocula. For this compare 2. 1. 59–60rure puer uerno primum de flore coronamfecit et antiquis imposuit Laribus.

Euterpe. An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambic Poetry

Euterpe. An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambic Poetry

Euterpe, An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambic Poetry

Euterpe, An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambic Poetry

The Elegiac Metre of Catullus

The metrical technique of Catullus in his elegiac verse has not yet received the detailed examination that has been given to the usage of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid by Platnauer in his Latin Elegiac Verse (Cambridge, 1951). Robinson Ellis in the Prolegomena to his Commentary on Catullus (Oxford, 1876) introduced this part of his subject in these words: ‘If we examine the metrical peculiarities of these elegies, we shall find their defects to lie mainly in the too exclusive imitation of Greek models.’ He then goes on to speak of the Greek practice of allowing the thought to run on uninterruptedly without necessarily a pause at the end of the couplet, and of the Greek freedom in admitting words of any length in the last place in the pentameter: ‘in these respects the Catullian elegy is completely Greek.’ In the Introduction to the Select Elegies of Propertius (Macmillan, 1884) by J.P. Postgate there is a brief reference to what is described as the ‘carelessness’ of Catullus about the ending of the pentameter, and a further censure is implied in the mention of ‘his extraordinary number of elisions’; in short, Postgate describes the elegiac of Catullus as ‘still semi-barbarous’. Clearly, we have a problem here, since it is hard to reconcile the two descriptions of verse which in some respects is ‘completely Greek’ and in others ‘semi-barbarous’.

Euterpe. An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambic Poetry. Edited, with Introductory Remarks and Commentary

Euterpe. An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambic Poetry. Edited, with Introductory Remarks and Commentary

Greek Lyric Poetry. A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry

Greek Lyric Poetry. A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry