Catullus

Catullus—The Complete Poetry translated by Frank O. Copley. The University of Michigan Press. $3.75.

Catullus is our first great lyric poet. If some of his Greek predecessors might present a prior claim, it would have to be answered not only that too few fragments remain of their work, but that too little can probably be understood about the relation of their poetic dialects to the speech and writing of their contemporary Lesbos and Alexandria. And it was by his manipulation of dialects and usage levels, by his confrontation of literary conventions with the rhetoric of public life and the directions and indirections of the most closeted causerie, that Catullus accomplished what is for our age that requisite task of the lyric writer, the ironic representation, rather than the unmixed report, of his feelings. He is our kind of lyric poet, paradoxically enough, just because his expression is sufficiently removed from actual singing. His poems engage us in their actions—pleading, cajoling, vilifying, lying, censuring, gossiping, mock-solemnizing the grossly trivial, and trifling with his most agonized commitments—rather than move us by the ravishing effortlessness of the process by which the feelings of the poet are shown forth. And perhaps most important of all, his lyric ego, the first person singular subject of worshipping, dissecting and cursing, becomes real in a dramatic way, living and moving in a world of friends, betrayers, confidants, hypocrites, knaves and fools, “her” and others, all variously akin to and unlike the “I” in status, power, virtue, wealth, discretion, health and habits, but all allied against him in their common inability to know the love that is his condition and his grace.