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3 1. Introduction Approaching Elegy In the past two hundred years or so, studies in Roman love elegy of the sort mocked by Yeats in his poem “The Scholars” have been divided primarily into source research and interpretation.Both efforts have been necessary,as elegy is not easily understood, for two main reasons. First, it often seems to express deeply felt emotion in apparently, but inconsistently, autobiographical fashion, although it is at the same time obviously filled with arti- fice. Second, readers conditioned by romanticism to expect sincerity, spontaneity , and, often, biography, from their love poetry have stumbled over the ironies and obscurities of elegy,unable to reconcile its apparent emotion with its evident artifice. In his groundbreaking (1950) article “ ‘Sincerity’ and the Roman Elegists,”Allen proved some fifty years ago that it is impossible to derive a factual autobiography of an elegiac poet or the actual history of the love affair apparently described in his elegies; he demonstrated that what might be called “the sincerity requirement”—the expectation that love poetry necessarily expresses the poet’s genuine emotion—is not relevant to elegy, which is more concerned with poetry than with autobiography or with recounting factual events in any historical love affair. Much work has since been done to demonstrate the thoroughly literate, highly crafted nature of elegy, but the demon of the sincerity requirement has proven hard to cast out.1 Since Roman love elegy is a self-consciously literate genre in the Alexandrian tradition, it not only expects but requires readers thoroughly learned in both Greek and Latin literature. As Thomas (1988: 59) notes, elegy could not have been written at an “uncluttered desk.”2 He further comments: “The personal poetry of Catullus (and the other neoterics), of Horace, and of the Augustan elegists is a splendidly complex body of literature , the product of two generations of poets who, with Vergil, effected a 4 / Concepts, Structures, and Characters more rapid maturation of their nation’s literature than has occurred in any other culture, in any other comparable period of time” (69). This complexity , both broad-ranging and deep, means that if any Roman poetry of this period is to be understood, its readers must be as literate as the poets. Its learned character requires dictionaries, commentaries, and piles of antecedent poetry for both production and—then as now—reception, for this particular love poetry is composed not in Yeats’s sleepless bed but, as Thomas notes, at the high-piled desk. The isolation of the personal library for authorial composition and readerly study places elegy in an already venerable public literary tradition of learned composition and dense allusion, a tradition that depends absolutely on learned reception. Thus, as elegy is being composed (a slow process in itself) its readers are in the poet’s mind. In fact elegy anticipates a very speci fic audience—many of its members known personally to the elegists Gallus,Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Sulpicia—of elite, educated, intellectual Romans. Such poetry may seem to be a relatively private genre, but although coterie poetry is not as widely distributed as epic poetry, it is still not personal or confessional: it is instead designed to be read by others, to be circulated among readers,and even,in the case of elegy,to be recited publicly by its authors at literary gatherings.3 Furthermore, it is designed for close evaluation, in what often amounts to implicit competition with other poets, both living and dead. In discussing the literary culture of the Roman elite, Habinek (1998: 124) coins the useful term “doctitude” and establishes that discernment is a constitutive part of being doctus: inevitably, the poet expects his readers not simply to read but also to evaluate, to judge, his poetry.4 Further, elegy’s overtly rhetorical nature, which confounds romanticminded readers, derives from the thorough instruction in principles and techniques of rhetoric that characterized the education of the Roman elite and were not only recognized but anticipated by its readers.5 In the context of elegy, the sincerity requirement, the expectation that this poetry will offer spontaneous expressions of pure feeling—”a fragment of a lover’s lament accidentally overheard,”6 in Wyke’s phrase (1989a: 168)—is both unwarranted and generically inappropriate. Though there may well be points of contact between romanticism and ancient Roman culture, the value placed on uninhibited,“natural”behavior is not one of them.It is easy to see how romantic critics, and scholars conditioned by romanticism, read Propertius...

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