Catullus

By Catullus

Book Overview

The most popular of the Roman poets, Catullus is known for the accessibility of his witty and erotic love poems. In this book Charles Martin, himself a poet, offers a deeper reading of Catullus, revealing the art and intelligence behind the seemingly spontaneous verse. Martin considers Catullus's life, habits of composition, and the circumstances in which he worked. He places him among the modernists of his age, who created a new ironic and subjective poetics, and he shows the affinity between Catullus and the modernists of our own age. Martin offers original interpretations of Catullus's poems, viewing the love poems to "Lesbia" as a unified, artfully arranged poetic sequence, and the short poems, often dismissed as unworthy of serious critical attention, as the irreverent products of a sophisticated poetic innovator. Unlike Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, Catullus did not influence our literary culture until the beginning of the modern era, but he is now regarded as a poet who speaks to our age with a singular directness. Pointing to Catullus's self-awareness, playfulness, and comic invention and to the elaborate complexity of his experiments in poetic form, Martin gives both the scholar and the general reader a fresh appreciation of his poetic art.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300052006
• ISBN13: 9780300052008
• Release Date: May 1992
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Catullus Textbook for AP Latin

Multa Bene this is an excellent book with all the information you need for the AP Catullus Latin literature course, now in it's final year

Great Translation by Martin. Highly Accessible.

After doing a lot of research into Catullus translations for a class, I picked this book. His edition is 1) complete and 2) consistently good. His use of modern slang and idioms is pretty convincing, and this is absolutely crucial since Catullus' poetry involves so much use of lively street expressions. Catullus selections in anthologies almost never reproduce the really filthy poems... I highly recommend the complete Martin translation for a more balanced view!