Latin Love Poetry

by McCoskey, Denise Eileen; Martirosova Torlone, Zara;

  Attempts to link Housman’s enduring interest in Propertius to his own poetry, especially A Shropshire Lad (1896), have been discouraging,40 but the British playwright Tom Stoppard, in his critically acclaimed play The Invention of Love (1997), presents Housman as a man whose textual obsessions and homosexual longings are deeply and inextricably woven together. Explaining his fascination with Propertius specifically, Stoppard’s Housman reflects that: ‘Propertius looked to me like a garden gone to wilderness, and not a very interesting garden either, but what an opportunity! – it was begging to be put back in order. Better still, various nincompoops thought they had already done it […] hacking about, to make room for their dandelions.’41 Earlier, Stoppard’s Housman articulates the central romance of texual criticism: that is, the possibility that every conjecture allows the one making it ‘to be the first person for thousands of years to read the verse as it was written’.42

  Ovid

  John Richmond is sobering in his statement that ‘all study of Ovid ultimately is based on our imperfect knowledge of what he actually wrote’.43 The extant Ovidian manuscripts, which contain large portions of his poetry, do not date earlier than the ninth century CE.44 For most of Ovid’s work, we therefore depend on what survives from the Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth and tenth centuries or later. Moreover, since Ovid was such a prolific author, we do not possess a single manuscript that contains all of his works.45 The Amores comes to us in two ninth-century French codices, which provide almost the entire work, and in one eleventh-century Italian manuscript, which preserves the whole work; the Ars Amatoria is transmitted in a French codex of the ninth century as a whole poem and in two codices of the eleventh century, one Italian, one (fragmentary) German or Swiss. The text of the Remedia Amoris depends on three manuscripts: one ninth-century French and two eleventh-century Italian codices.

  The Heroides come down to us in substantial fragments from one ninth-century French manuscript, which seems to have been copied from a poor ‘archetype’; the rest of the tradition of the Heroides is in even worse condition. The Epistulae ex Ponto is contained in one ninth-century French codex, which stops in the middle of the second poem of Book 3; two German manuscripts of the twelfth century are our only source for the whole poem. The Tristia, like the Heroides, also fell victim to a poor tradition and the earliest version of the poem is present in two almost illegible leaves of a codex, probably German, from the tenth century. In producing an edition of the Tristia, scholars thus are forced to use one fragmentary manuscript and another Italian codex, both belonging to the eleventh century. The best manuscript of the Medicamina Faciei Femineae also dates to the eleventh century.

  It was obviously a significant challenge for the earliest scholars of Ovid to produce a reliable text of his elegiac poetry. Further complicating matters was Ovid’s growing popularity beginning in the eleventh century. From that point on, there were continuing attempts to produce a single volume of all Ovidian works – a task that might seem admirable, but that often led to the inclusion of spurious works by those editors who tried to be comprehensive, thus inadvertently contributing to the confusion of transmission. Hence a large number of codices from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that survive today contain texts markedly different from the earlier manuscripts listed above, making it virtually impossible to reconstruct which manuscripts are derivative and which can be traced to a more ancient original or archetype.46 Even the first print edition of Ovid in 1471 did not offer a fully reliable text and was emended numerous times.47

  While the restoration of ancient texts was a major focus of Renaissance intellectuals, writers and artists also derived patent inspiration from an ancient world that was now breathing new life. Beginning with the Renaissance, we can witness centuries of lively engagement with Latin love poetry, both in successive attempts at translation – which would help widen awareness of the love poets’ original work – and in more open-ended and creative expressions.

  Early Literary Receptions

  As we have seen, Petrarch played a key role in Propertius’ textual transmission; he may also have been instrumental in bringing Tibullus back to Italy from France.48 Even more, Petrarch’s own love poetry about the unattainable Laura fundamentally shaped later receptions of Latin elegy. In the next century, Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), an important Italian poet of the fifteenth century, ‘produced two remarkable collections of poetry in the style of Catullus, and within a few years Catullan poetry was established as a recognizable and popular genre’.49 As with poets of later generations, many Renaissance writers focused their response to Catullus on two specific themes: ‘kisses and sparrows’.50 During this era, there was already growing concern about whether the Latin love poets, given their frequent lasciviousness, belonged in educational settings, with many arguing that they should only be available to more mature readers.51

  Significantly, from 1472 on, Propertius, Tibullus and Catullus were often printed together, comprising, as one scholar phrases it, ‘the triumvirs of love’.52 The influence of these poets is clearly visible in the work of the so-called ‘neo-Latin’ poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially that of the Dutch poet Janus or Johannes Secundus (1511–1536).53 Propertius also inspired Renaissance poets such as Ludovico Ariosto (1473–1533) and Torquato Tasso (1544–1595). In France, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585) published numerous poetic works influenced by both Propertius and Ovid. Tibullus, on the other hand, became renowned as ‘a sentimental, melancholy poet of love and the countryside’ and his popularity, albeit modest, lasted well into the nineteenth century. Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), an Italian poet and cardinal, was clearly inspired by Tibullus, while Chateaubriand (1768–1848), a French writer, diplomat and historian recalls in his Mémoirs how he fell under Tibullus’ spell as an adolescent.54

  Still, the popularity of the other love poets was in many ways completely overshadowed by Ovid, who held considerable sway in the courtly poetry of the medieval period;55 in particular, his Amores informed ‘the secular erotics of the troubadours’.56 Although Dante (c.1265–1321) lists Ovid ‘among the great ancient poets in Limbo, third after Homer and Horace’,57 Ovid’s pagan legacy was viewed in the Middle Ages with some discomfort. While Chaucer (c.1343–1400) puts him second on the list of great classical epic poets between Virgil and Homer,58 Petrarch accuses Ovid of having a ‘lascivious and lubricious and altogether womanish mind’.59 The Metamorphoses is generally considered the chief Ovidian work from which later ages drew inspiration, and it was only during the Renaissance that the discomfort associated with Ovid’s amatory works began to dissipate.60 The range of Ovid’s literary output continued to make his reception diverse as he alternately presented himself in the ‘roles of dangerous immoralist, tragic exile, natural or ethical philosopher, medical doctor […] and magician’.61

  From the eleventh century on, the Heroides in particular was treated as a didactic work ‘providing models of faithful love to be imitated’.62 The genre of amatory verse-epistle, however, did not fully impact French literature until the fifteenth century, when the form started to be cultivated by writers like Christine de Pizan (1363–1430) and Georges Chastellain (c.1415–1475). By this time, the moral message of the Heroides had completely overshadowed their entertainment value and the poems erroneously began to be seen by some as redemptive poetry written in exile in an attempt to regain the favour of Augustus.63 In the sixteenth century, the genre of poetic love letters became popular with several writers like André de la Vigne (fl. 1485–1515), Guillaume Crétin (c.1460–1525) and Fausto Andrelini (c.1462–1518). In particular, Andrelini placed the genre in the service of the state, and especially noteworthy are his verse-epistles, which illustrate the ‘imaginative reworking of Ovid’ as Andrelini transports ‘Ovid’s elegiac laments into the political realm of pre-Renaissance France’.64 Written in Latin in the name of Queen Anne de Bretagne, these letters aim to celebrate Louis XII’s victorious Italian campaign and address the events at the Fren
ch king’s court through mythical allegories. Drawing on the example of that most chaste of ancient wives, Penelope, Anne emerges as the ruler of state and even toys with the idea of entering military combat at the side of her husband. Guillaume Crétin, a popular French poet and courtier, translated the first of Andrelini’s epistles into French and later composed his own Heroidean-style letter in which the women of Paris write in encomiastic style to their absent king Charles.65

  Ancient Love in Modern Times

  Inspired by his travel to Italy in 1786–1788, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) composed his Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies), a work in elegiac metre that shows the clear influence of the earlier Latin love poets.66 As with the Roman poets, Goethe finds ‘material’ in his beloved Faustine (18.9), although Faustine is an emphatically loyal mistress, one whose stable love for the poet epitomizes a larger ‘ideal of harmony between art and nature, present and past’.67 Throughout, Goethe’s vision of antiquity underscores the relevance of the past, casting the ancient world as neither a ‘closed period nor a boring topic at school, but an engaging present’.68 Having provided a general survey of the love poets’ transmission and early reception, we would like in the remainder of the chapter to focus more closely on a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century receptions, all of which attest to the depth and geographic breadth of the love poets’ modern influence. We begin with a closer look at Catullus’ arrival in England and Propertius’ unique place in the work of Ezra Pound.

  Catullus in English

  In Renaissance England, as elsewhere, Ovid gained considerable popularity, although the dynamics of his reception varied. Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) and Benjamin ‘Ben’ Jonson (1572–1637), for example, focused on different aspects of Ovid’s ‘pagan Muse’. While Marlowe revelled in Ovid’s libertine twists and offered an eager public the first complete uncensored translation of the Amores, Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, was uncomfortable with Ovid’s sexual license and avoided the Amores, embracing instead Ovid’s exilic elegy in his work The Forest.69 Among his other works that show classical influence, John Donne (1572–1631) composed a series of love poems, the most infamous of which was an expansion of Ovid’s account of his mid-afternoon encounter with Corinna in Amores 1.5.70 Despite social and educational barriers, many women in Renaissance England also wrote poetry responding to Ovid’s work. Both Isabella Whitney (active in the second half of the sixteenth century) and Anne Wharton (1659–1685) adapted Ovid’s Heroides, while Christabella Rogers (active in the seventeenth century) wrote a poem in imitation of Ovid’s programmatic first poem of the Amores, this time defying Cupid in preference of moral philosophy.71

  It is generally agreed that Catullus reached England later than other classical writers, although the early Tudor poet John Skelton (active in the late fifteenth and early sixteen centuries) called himself ‘the British Catullus’, suggesting that at least a general sense of Catullus’ work had arrived by then.72 John Bernard Emperor traces Catullus’ influence on English lyric poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century, placing special emphasis on the work of Thomas Campion (1567–1620) – who, like many poets, authored his own take on Catullus’ poem urging Lesbia to live and love (poem 5) – and Robert Herrick (1591–1674).73 Catullus’ work nonetheless received an enormous boost in England with the first printed edition there in 1684.74 As in other periods, the Lesbia and sparrow poems continued to dominate as points of artistic reference;75 in 1798, for example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) produced his own version of Catullus 5.‌76

  In the nineteenth century, Catullus’ poem about Sirmio (31) and his lament for his dead brother (101), poems previously overlooked in his reception, became popular.77 Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) relied on both 31 and 101 in composing a poem to his own deceased brother, ‘Frater Ave atque Vale’.78 Poem 31 appealed especially to the Romantic sensibility and was admired, for one, by Savage Landor (1775–1864).79 Poem 101, on the other hand, was referenced by the Victorian poet ‘most obviously devoted to Catullus’, Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), in his moving tribute to Baudelaire entitled ‘Ave atque Vale’.80 Later, the American lyric poet Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) commemorated Swinburne’s own death with a poem proclaiming of the much-admired Swinburne that ‘Catullus waits to welcome him’.81 Catullus was also taken up by other women writers during this era, including the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), who united both Lesbia and the sparrow via the necessity of death in the poem ‘Passer Mortuus Est’.82 The American author Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), with her characteristic dry humour, portrayed Lesbia mocking Catullus’ role as poet, writing, ‘He’s always hymning that or wailing this’, having Lesbia conclude: ‘That stupid fool! I’ve always hated birds…’83

  From the earliest spread of his work, Catullus’ reputation for obscenity coloured his reception, at times dampening his appeal, while at others presumably fostering it.84 Indeed, although many of the love poets were targets of censure at different historical moments, Catullus’ work, more than any other, has been subject to harsh critique and often ruthless censorship: in his Don Juan, the English poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) remarks that ‘Catullus scarcely has a decent poem’ (I.xlii.3), and a commentary on Catullus written as recently as 1961 simply omitted thirty-two of his poems.85 Well into the twentieth century, many classical scholars continued to obfuscate Catullus’ desires for Juventius. As Gaisser phrases it, ‘they could render the homosexual invective Catullus hurled against his enemies, but they could not allow a homosexual romance to the poet himself.’86

  In his poem, ‘The Scholars,’ the Irish author W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) uses Catullus to illustrate the great divide between ‘elderly, tepid, bourgeois scholars’ and ‘young, warm-hearted, bohemian love poets who write about the pain of love’.87 The British poet Sidney Keyes (1922–1943) seems to capture well the resonance of Catullus in giving voice not only to longing, but also to the disenchantment felt by the young generation as they approached the mid-twentieth century at a time of devastating war. In his translation of Catullus 11 from May 1942, Keyes thus conveys the Sapphic image of the butchered flower by lamenting, ‘And never look to me for love again – / My love’s like any flower of the fallow / Cut down and wasted by the passing plow.’88 The poignancy of Keyes’ translation would prove to have unbearable echo in the fact that just under a year later he was killed in action in Tunisia at the age of twenty-one.89

  Some thirty years before, the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972), another poet deeply marked by war, first travelled to Sirmione in Italy, the area so beloved by Catullus, which became an important location for Pound also throughout his life.‌90 Pound was influenced by a number of Latin authors over the course of his career. In a letter, he stated directly that ‘Catullus, Propertius, Horace and Ovid are the people who matter. Catullus most.’‌91 As such valuation intimates, Pound’s engagement with Catullus was extensive.‌92 Openly scornful of Virgil, he would later turn to Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an epic intertext for the major work of his later years, the Cantos.‌93 But it is Pound’s dialogue with Propertius that perhaps best reveals his modernist reimagining of Latin poetry.

  Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius

  Without question, the events of Pound’s later life have played a profound role in his troubled reputation today. Perhaps most dramatically, following a series of essays and radio broadcasts in ardent support of Italian Fascism, Pound was indicted for treason in 1943 by the United States and eventually surrendered to American troops in 1945. Following his brief imprisonment in Italy, he was flown to the United States, where he was judged mentally unfit and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Pound remained there until 1958, returning to Italy after his release for the remainder of his life.

  Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius comes at a much earlier point in his career, in the shadow, in fact, of the First World War.94 Pound finished the Homage in 1917 and published it in
parts, beginning in 1919.95 Since ‘not until the twentieth century do we find anything like a nonscholarly interest taken in Propertius’,96 Pound was in many ways ‘a pioneer in championing the poetry of Propertius’.97 In July of 1916, Pound had written to Iris Barry that ‘if you CAN’T find any decent translations of Catullus and Propertius, I suppose I shall have to rig up something’,98 and the first wave of criticism narrowly assessed the work as a translation of Propertius, leading one reviewer (a professional classicist) to remark notoriously that ‘if Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide’.99 Pound himself fired back by noting that ‘the philologists have so succeeded in stripping the classics of interest that I have already had more than one reader who has asked me, “Who was Propertius?”’100

  Rather than providing a straightforward translation of the earlier poet, Pound sought to use Propertius’ persona as a kind of ‘mask through which Pound registered his protest at what he thought was the monstrous state of society and culture in which he found himself living’.101 Later, in 1931, Pound wrote that his identification with Propertius was due to a profound sense that they both stood opposed to overreaching state power, suggesting that the poem ‘presents certain emotions as vital to me in 1917, faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire, as they were to Propertius some centuries earlier, when faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire’.102 In calling attention to Propertius’ use of irony, moreover, Pound set himself strongly against the more sentimental readings of the Latin poet that had tended to dominate his reception, as limited as it was.103 Throughout the work, Pound engages in extensive wordplay and jarring juxtaposition, features reminiscent of Propertius’ surviving text. Key to Pound’s overall sense of Propertius’ aesthetic was a quality he later called logopoeia, which Pound described loosely as ‘the dance of the intellect among words’, an intensity of thought expressed in language.104