Customer Reviews

Poems (Classics of World Literature)

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This guy is a genius. Found out about him through Colleen McCullough's books, and have been addicted ever since.
Reading him is to discover a bygone age that's at once disturbingly familiar, in all its decadent glory, the careless everyday passings and flings, the petty feuds, etc. He tells us who's sleeping with who, who's been jilted, who's beautiful and why it doesn't always matter, of love found, experienced, lost and rejection. His poems are bawdy, hilarious, totally un-p.c., stormy, dark and brooding, yet tender and poignant at the same time.

I especially liked poem 5 ("lesbia, let us love and live..."), poem 42 (the one about the notebook stealer) and 101 ("ave atque vale") -I hope I got the numbers right; I don't have the book in front of me.

A writer once claimed that Catullus' works are "more fun that waving a dog's head on a stick at your mother". While how fun a severed head might be I don't know (and wouldn't want to find out!), the poems are definately a treasure, and Michie's is by far the best translation (have read a few others, not nearly as good).

Though hardly remembered as artsy, the Romans managed to muster some of the finer works of ancient times. From Aurelius to Catullus, the Roman culture has been given the shaft historically with all the talk of how stoic and unemotional the culture was. Catullus is exhibit A in the argument that Rome did have a heart, and a strong exhibit at that. These poems, along with other works by Catullus, accomplish something which few other foreign works can: retain beauty through translation. Whether by luck or design, the poems rival the best of Yeats and Keats in terms of expressing emotional discontent and making the ordinary seem extraordinary. To quote Coleridge, Catullus has "More than usual emotion with more than usual order." He's got a leash on his love but it still burns as brightly as any other poet's.