Propertius among the Poets

Extract

The dissatisfaction which orderly-minded schoolboys generally feel when they first attempt to read the works of Propertius all too often persists among more mature readers who turn to the elegies in search of genuine literary experience. After tasting the immediate attraction of the other Augustans, whether the inexhaustible richness of Virgil and Horace, the brilliance of Ovid, or the gentle music of Tibullus, the reader continually turns away frustrated from Propertius. What, after all, is one to make of a poet whose words simply do not make sense by any accepted standard; who cries aloud for textual emendation, but never has enough of it until he has been utterly transformed by transpositions and by marks of long lacunae, as in Richmond's edition, or whittled away into something like a pedestrian Ovid; who describes a society which interests us intensely, yet hardly ever succeeds in transmitting to the reader any sort of direct experience of the life he lived and the sights he saw; who continually invites the reader by the overpowering emotion of the opening of a poem, often with some particle to indicate that we are arriving in the middle of a pre-existing train of thought, and then tails off into that artificial Alexandrianism which he plainly thought so admirable, but which we can appreciate only as an odd historical phenomenon? After considering these characteristics, one is more than ever convinced that Horace was speaking of Propertius, and speaking justly, when he criticized the pretensions of the self-styled ‘Roman Callimachus’.