Catullus 8 and Catullan Iambos

In this paper, I account for Catullus' use of the choliambic meter in poem 8 and show how his redeployment of this iambic meter impacts our understanding of genre. Seeing meter as an integral formal feature of the genre of Iambos, I argue that Catullus' use of this meter encodes generic features. In poem 8, those features are seen to be iambic distance and the concomitant iambic voice, characterized by a self-conscious multiplicity.