Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Catullus [1]

Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Ravide,

agit praecipitem in meos iambos?

quis deus tibi non bene advocatus

vecordem parat excitare rixam?

an ut pervenias in ora vulgi?

quid vis? qualubet esse notus optas?

eris, quandoquidem meos amores

cum longa voluisti amare poena.

Unless meos amores is purposely vague, at least two objects of Catullus’s affections must be in question? Would you say that this piece is in a vein of good-humoured banter?

I do not think meos amores necessarily alludes to more than one love affair. I think it is more than good-humoured banter; there seems to me to be a note of careless scorn in it, but no serious anger. I suppose with Catullus one cannot take either his self-depreciation or his self-assertion as a poet very seriously — like most poets of his power he must have been aware of his genius, but expressed it half humourously as one would expect from a well-bred man of the world. I don’t know either about his scurrilous attacks — literary invective perhaps, but is there not a little more to it than that? He puts the lash with something more than a whimsical violence in many places — the verses he wrote after the rupture leave a terrible mark.

11 January 1937