Catullus : Gaius Valerius (c.84-c.54 BC), intensely emotional Roman poet whose expressions of love & hatred are considered the finest lyric poetry of ancient Rome.
... certainly received his inspiration from Krishna. Catullus and Horace You prefer Catullus [ to Horace ] because he was a philosopher? You have certainly rolled Lucretius here into Catullus—Lucretius who wrote an epic about the "Nature of Things" and invested the Epicurean philosophy with a rudely Roman and most unepicurean majesty and grandeur. Catullus had no more philosophy in him than a red ant.... mind, a vital man with a strong sociability, faithful and ardent in friendship, a bon vivant fond of good food and good wine, a lover of women but not ardently passionate Page 372 like Catullus, an Epicurean who took life gladly but not superficially—this was his character. As a poet he was the second among the great Augustan poets, a great master of phrase—the most quoted of all the Roman... a few poems of great beauty and perfectly intelligible." [p. 20] 60 poems if they have beauty are as good as 600. It is not the mass of the poet's work that determines his greatness. Gray and Catullus wrote little; we have only seven plays of Sophocles and seven of Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven put them still in the front rank of poets. He says that "Mallarmé's verse is ...
... Disertissime Romuli nepotum, quot sunt quotque fuere, Marce Tulli, quotque post aliis erunt in annis, gratias tibi maximas Catullus agit pessimus omnium poeta, tanto pessimus omnium poeta, quanto tu optimus omnium patronus. Would you not say that Catullus was bound to have looked upon Cicero the man as a pompous ass, however sincerely he may have admired Cicero the man of letters? ... On Poets and Poetry Letters on Poetry and Art Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900) Catullus Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Ravide, agit praecipitem in meos iambos? quis deus tibi non bene advocatus vecordem parat excitare rixam? an ut pervenias in ora vulgi? quid vis? qualubet esse notus optas? eris, quandoquidem meos amores... amores necessarily alludes to more than one love affair. I think it is more than good-humoured banter; there seems to me to be a note of careless scorn in it, but no serious anger. I suppose with Catullus one cannot take either his self-depreciation or his self-assertion as a poet very seriously—like most poets of his power he must have been aware of his genius, but expressed it half humourously as ...
... Virgil is greater than Catullus and that many of Virgil's lines are greater than anything Catullus ever achieved. But poetical perfection is not the same thing as poetical greatness. Virgil is perfect at his best, but Catullus too is perfect at his best: even, each has a certain exquisiteness of perfection, each in his own kind. Virgil's kind is large and deep, that of Catullus sweet and intense. Virgil's... Virgil's art reached or had from its beginning Page 39 a greater and more constant ripeness than that of Catullus. We can say then that Virgil was a greater poet and artist of word and rhythm but we cannot say that his poetry, at his best, was more perfect poetry and that of Catullus less perfect. That renders futile many of the attempts at comparison like Arnold's comparison of Wordsworth's ...
... Virgil is greater than Catullus and that many of Virgil's lines are greater than anything Catullus ever achieved. But poetical perfection is not the same thing as poetical greatness. Virgil is perfect at his best, but Catullus too is perfect at his best: even each has a certain exquisiteness of perfection, each in his own kind. Virgil's kind is large and deep, that of Catullus sweet and intense. Virgil's... Virgil's art reached or had from its beginning a greater and more constant ripeness than that of Catullus. We can say then that Virgil was a greater poet and artist of word and rhythm but we cannot say that his poetry, at his best, was more perfect poetry and that of Catullus less perfect. That renders futile many of the attempts at comparison like Arnold's comparison of Wordsworth' s Skylark ...
... Gaius Valerius Catullus (87-54? BC). Roman poet and epigrammatist. Page 340 Next Horace. You prefer Catullus because he was a philosopher? You have certainly rolled Lucretius 1 here into Catullus—Lucretius who wrote an epic about the "Nature of Things" and invested the Epicurean philosophy with a rudely Roman and most unepicurean majesty and grandeur. Catullus had no more philosophy... and Horace 1 ) don't seem to posterity as outstandingly psychic beings, do they? Nevertheless, I am glad that Horace was one of my refreshing ancestors, though I would have preferred to have been Catullus, 2 the philosopher poet. But I fondly trust that Horace was not simply a poet but a man too, worth the name. But somehow I am sorry I was the hectoring Hector once, in my previous birth. And then... perfectly balanced mind, a vital man with a strong sociability, faithful and ardent in friendship, a bon vivant fond of good food and good wine, a lover of women but not ardently passionate like Catullus, an Epicurean who took life gladly but not superficial—that was his character. As a poet he was the second among the great Augustan poets, a great master of phrase—the most quoted of all the Roman ...
... waiting to be revealed. He may be as poignantly personal and fired with the body's hunger as Sappho and Catullus, yet the urge to his lyrical self-expression is not merely the joys and griefs of a personal libido: it is also an aspiration for a flawless magic of verbal form. Sappho and Catullus were not lovers grown vocal and nothing more: they were pre-eminently idealists of speech, their passion... feelings and the thoughts as though some concealed godhead were taking body through each poem. By answering that mysterious call of inspiration and not just the voice of Atthis or Lesbia, Sappho and Catullus wrote poetry. Whether they were intellectually conscious of serving a divinity in which they believed, is immaterial. All that was necessary for art was that they should be conscious of an overwhelming ...
... question mark in connection with the time of the first Roman emperor. I feel a great affinity to Catullus with his commingling of the erotic and the wistful, and very interestingly Sri Aurobindo's early verse is most reminiscent of this lyricist.... ... Ordinarily we would be tempted to see Catullus redivivus in the early Sri Aurobindo but knowing better the personality of his past we can only... only say that he carried over to our time a close kinship to that poet which would tend to draw to himself whoever happened to be a new manifestation of him. Catullus died before Octavius became emperor but it is a guess worth hazarding that Lydia's victim with his pathetic "odi et amo" was as much a literary influence on him as the master of the epic and the expert of the odes. (03.12.1994) ...
... thousand kisses. Ordinarily we would be tempted to see Catullus redivivus Page 317 in the early Sri Aurobindo, but knowing better the personality of his past we can only say that he carried over to our time a close kinship to that poet which would tend to draw to himself whoever happened to be a new manifestation of him. Catullus died before Octavius became emperor, but part of their... I, who as a poet was patronised by him even more than they, am still a question-mark in connection with the Page 316 time of the first Roman emperor. I feel a strong affinity to Catullus with his commingling of the erotic and the wistful, and very interestingly the early verse of Sri Aurobindo himself is most reminiscent of this lyrist. Save for the jar of the girl-friend's name ...
... themes are found in much Greek drama. Touches of the Romantic occur in Latin literature too - in Ovid "with his love-lorn heroines", Virgil "with his Messianic broodings and his passionate Dido", Catullus "the Roman Burns'', Propertius ''the Roman Rossetti'' . 7 In giving examples of Romantic lines, Lucas 8 does not only mention Wordsworth's Lady of the Mere Sole-sitting by the shores... though he has called several things in Greek poetry Romantic he would like not to exaggerate; for Homer and Aeschylus never sound the extreme Romantic note that is heard in Spenser and Marlowe, while Catullus in even his "Romantic frenzy" is still "Classically clear". Could we argue that impulses and fantasies were not as much at work? Should we put Aeschylus, for instance, below any Elizabethan in sheer ...
... a special appeal to our heart. Of course, there are poets whose creations totally lack spirituality or even something akin to it. For example, Catullus, of whom Sri Aurobindo says: "He has as much philosophy in him as a red ant." A poet like Catullus can easily be put forward to contradict Bremond's conclusion. Granted, such poets are very few in number, nevertheless they appear to prove Bremond's ...
... up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from whoever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catullus, Horace? They did a good deal of inventing or of transferring—introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can't spot a precedent in modern European literature but there must be some. And after ...
... Iliad or Vyasa's Mah ā bh ā rata or Dante's Divina Commedia as a nightingale's song. Least of all would we normally associate this song with Paradise Lost. The nightingale reminds us of Catullus and Campion, Sappho and Sarojini Naidu. It is a symbol of lyricism. And in a very evident sense the grandioseness of Milton's chant is at the opposite pole to the lyrical. But Milton the epic poet ...
... obligatory that one should have a great soul in order to be, a great poet?" In the hoary past it was almost so. Valmiki, Vyasa and Homer rightly deserve to fall into that category. But the ancient Latin Catullus, the French poet Villon of the medieval age, most of the 'Satanic' poets of the Romantic age, and Oscar Wilde and Rimbaud of the present age – none of them are great souls or possess anything remarkably ...
... the heart of the Ineffable. 81 What is probably the most astonishing of Sri Aurobindo's short poems, Thought the Paraclete is in modified hendeca-syllabics, remotely reminiscent of Catullus. In the Aurobindonian version, the ten syllables in the line are made up of a trochee, followed by a spondee, a dactyl, a trochee again, and a final long. The idea behind the poem is that, as human ...
... worth, but if acquired with pain and labour, the memory of the effort leaves a bad taste in the mouth which it is difficult to expunge. I read Vergil at school and never read a line of him now but Catullus I skimmed through in my arm-chair and love and appreciate. Keshav —Your distinction is subtle and suggestive, Treneth, but it never occurred to me in that light before. Treneth —It never occurred ...
... × Suns may set and come again; For us, when once our brief light has set, There is one perpetual night to be slept. CATULLUS ...
... Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil and Lucretius. These six, all things considered, are indeed greater than the brilliant sextet: Pindar, Simonides, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, Ovid. There need be no quarrel on this score. But does Page 20 Homer belong exactly to the same pychological plane ...
... score up wealthy sums On my lips, thus hardly sundered, While you breathe. First give a hundred, Then a thousand... 2 C H. Hertford 3 remarks: "The simple intensity of the [Catullus passage] offered no vantage-ground for the salient qualities of Jonson's style, and became, 'literally' rendered, merely smooth and insignificant... Campion came far nearer with the superb Elizabethan ...
... which made his style the legitimate foundation for all future poetry. Virgil marked almost a ne plus ultra of poetical Latinity; Spenser had a chord or two missing because no Lucretius and Catullus prepared his way and also on account of a certain dearth in himself of direct passion and that epic fibre which, for all his tendency towards the effeminate, Virgil never lacked — yet his spell of ...
... a few poems of great beauty and perfectly intelligible." 63 60 poems, if they have beauty, are as good as 600. It is not the mass of the poet's work that determines his greatness. Gray and Catullus wrote little; we have only 7 plays of Sophocles and seven of Aeschylus (though they wrote more), but these seven put them still in the front rank of poets. He says that "Mallarmé's verse is acquired ...
... 1944). This was printed as an appendix in the two earlier editions of the present book (1945, 1950), but is not included in the present edition. Page 633 of the hendecasyllabics of Catullus; but instead of a spondee followed by a dactyl and a succession of three trochees, Sri Aurobindo begins with a trochee, the spondee and the dactyl follow, and are followed by two trochees, and the ...
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