Poetry as Performance

This chapter examines the performative model of positioning the agency of the poet in relation to the speech and events depicted in the storyworld. This model hews more closely to the norms established by traditional performed poetry. In this case, the speaker knows that his words have the special status of poetry, and his speech may be formulated with an eye to audiences other than the named interlocutor. In contrast to the speaker of conversational poems, who is focused on trying to exert his will through speech, the speaker in this performative model embodies the mastery of poetic form and the assurance granted to an authorized performer. Poems built on this model are more likely to exhibit formal features that thematize the special status of address or that require suspension of thought or that highlight the poem's overall structure. One can easily see how the agency of such a speaker echoes the agency of the poet crafting the text. The chapter then considers Catullus's invective poems and Horace's hymns and dedicatory poems.

Voices on the Page

This introductory chapter provides an overview of first-person Latin poems. It begins by studying a poem by Gaius Valerius Catullus, which yokes together the world of the characters and the world of the reader by means of the first-person speaker, who is positioned as both a character in the storyworld and the author of the text. The chapter then seeks to describe how first-person Latin poems produce their distinctive charisma by intertwining social and literary communication. Central to the effects of such poems is the fact that one can see the poem's discourse as an artistic creation designed to communicate with readers who will have no other contact with the poet. Also central to their effects, however, is the fact that this orientation toward distant or future readers is almost never registered explicitly in the poem, which instead shows an image of face-to-face communication in an intimate social world that readers can never access.