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Form and Irony in Catullus XLV1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
Catullus' forty-fifth poem has become in recent years a focus for a certain amount of controversy. In this respect it has not been alone among the poems of Catullus' libellus; Catullan criticism has been undergoing a process of reassessment whereby a somewhat indiscriminate enthusiasm for certain poems has been challenged by an attitude in some cases more sophisticated, in others, perhaps, simply more devious. In the case of the poem under discussion, a traditional view, represented by J. Ferguson who quotes with approval Munro's estimate of the poem (‘the most charming picture in any language of a light and happy love’), has been rejected by several scholars who agree that the poem is, in some sense, ironical, while disagreeing in their reasons for so concluding. Before we examine their arguments we should, perhaps, be careful to define precisely what we mean by irony.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1971
References
page 180 note 2 AJP lxxvii (1956), 12–13.Google Scholar
page 181 note 1 Heilman, R. B., quoted in Shakespeare's Tragedies (ed. Laurence Lerner, Pelican, 1963), 120.Google Scholar
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page 181 note 3 e.g. hymn-form. See Horace's use of it in Odes iii. 21.
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page 182 note 1 The Catullan Revolution (Melbourne, 1959).Google Scholar
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page 184 note 3 So Ellis and Fordyce.
page 185 note 1 Although it is usually hazardous to suggest any specific correspondence between sound and sense, it is not, perhaps, entirely fanciful to suspect that Septimius' p's are intended to express masculine assertiveness and Acme's m's feminine submissiveness.
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