CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Catullus and the Programmatic Poem: The Origins, Scope, and Utility of a Concept
Definition and Examples
The identification and interpretation of “programmatic poetry” is an interpretive activity that is in many ways peculiar within the practice of classics in the wake of the old New Criticism. The term does not appear in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) or William Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature (1996), and an internet search finds that in academic discourse and even in interviews with poets “programmatic poetry” usually refers either to poetry with a distinct political or ideological program or to poetry that is written for a specific occasion (like “programmatic music”). For most classicists, however, “programmatic poetry” refers to those poems or passages where poets, either directly or indirectly, speak of their poetry. They may outline the contents, themes, and subjects of a book of poetry or offer a general defense of a genre, like satire, or of an aesthetic, like neo-Callimacheanism. The program may take form as a positive assertion of values or as an attack on the aesthetics of those who do not share the poet’s values and practice. Outside the program poems of satire, programmatic assertions are typically metaphorical or figurative, and even in satire the “figure of the satirist” is not to be equated with the poet, nor what he says with the purpose of the genre. Programmatic poetry is most interesting, illuminating, and controversial when it is concerned with poetic goals, literary approach, and stylistic preferences, but it is always taken to be a self-conscious authorial statement (which may still be ironic) about a poetic practice larger than the occasion of the particular poem or passage.
Catullus 1
Perhaps the most uncontroversial1 example of a programmatic poem in the Catullan corpus is one that introduces the collection we have:
To whom do I give my new pleasant little book,
polished just now with the dry pumice?
To you, Cornelius, because you used to
think my stuff was worth something,
long ago, when you alone of the Italians dared
to unfold the whole of history in three rolls,
learned, by Jupiter, and belabored.
And so, have it yourself, whatever this little book
is, whatever it’s worth, and, O my patron Muse,
let it remain through the years more than a lifetime.
Here, in the guise of a dedication poem, Catullus is understood to speak indirectly of the aesthetic values that his poetry will evince. His book, by being pleasant (lepidus), new (novus), and small (libellus), does not fit either the conservative tradition of moral gravitas or the tradition of historical epic. By referring to it as “stuff” (nugae) and by being self-effacing in his own evaluation (“whatever this little book is”, “whatever it’s worth”), he recalls its colloquial unpretentiousness. The papyrus roll is polished, which recalls the language of the neo-Callimachean tradition, one that values refined, careful attention to the minutiae of style, and this attention is illustrated by the reference to the “dry pumice,” which recalls the language of style in the rhetorical tradition, and so specifies his stylistic proclivities in terms of precision, lack of excess, and elegance (Batstone 1998).
Even the dedicatee, Cornelius Nepos, plays a role in this program: as the recipient of the book, he both points to its value and represents the kind of person who will find value in this book: a man who appreciates the unpretentious, a man of intellectual daring and concision, a man of learning, and one who understands the need for hard work. Some of these characteristics Nepos shares with the Catullus of this poem: concision is found in the small book, daring in the publication of trifles, hard work in the polish. Other characteristics will be found to mark Catullus’ own poetry: learning, as when Catullus complains that he cannot send Manlius a poetic gift because he did not bring his books from Rome (68.31–40); the lone figure standing amid history may recall Catullus wandering the reaches of the Roman Empire (c. 11).
On this reading of Catullus 1, the poet alludes to his style, his values, and his audience. One might say that it is an effort to introduce his readers to his poetic project by suggesting that they might adopt the values that he and Cornelius share. None of this means that the poem is not also a dedication poem to an older fellow Transpadane who could have, and may have, helped Catullus as a young writer in Rome. In fact, one may read this occasion as an introduction to the exchange value of poetry in Rome and in the Catullan corpus, to its role in friendship and gift-giving. Like many programmatic poems, Catullus 1 uses both its language of reference and its nominal occasion (see Feldherr, this volume) to make more general statements about Catullus’ poetic practice.
Catullus 27
Another kind of programmatic poem addresses the contents of a specific book without elaborating a larger poetic practice. For instance, just before Catullus launches into satiric attacks upon Piso’s staff and upon Caesar and Pompey, he inserts a poem, c. 27, that seems to be addressed to his attendant at a symposium, but may be read as an announcement of new concerns and the transition to a new stylistic register (Wiseman 1969: 7–8; cf. Thomson 1997: 200–1):
Slave-boy, server of aged Falernian,
fill for me more bitter cups
as the law of Postumia requires, a mistress
drunker than the drunken grape.
But you, o waters, destroyers of wine,
begone and away, and take up residence
with the righteous: here is the undiluted Bacchic.
There is much that is disputed about this poem, but a programmatic reading will note that Catullus imagines his poetry in terms of a banquet, and, in fact, it is quite likely that the most common performance of his work would be as the entertainment at a banquet. The description of the cups as “bitter” is an apt description of satire in general and it is the dominant mood of Catullus’ political satire. Consequently, the call for “more bitter” cups suggests that Catullus’ poetry will become more savage. Postumia, whoever she is (perhaps the wife of Ser. Sulpicius Rufus, cos. 51), has the unusual and perhaps licentious (certainly drunken) role of presiding over the toasts – which may also be seen as a figure for Catullus’ poems.
When the poet dismisses the water that is used to dilute wine, saying “pass over to the moralists,” one may remember that he had earlier distinguished himself from these same moralists by rejecting their talk: “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love and value the talk of moralistic old men as worth a single penny!” (5.1–2). This suggests an alignment of poetry with its erotic and Bacchic concerns against both moralism and politics-as-usual, and a witty rewriting of the lex Postumia (“the Postumian law”), a law of Numa’s time that regulated wine and libations. Thus, we seem to have an intersection of Falernian wine (an expensive aged wine from Naples, the favorite of poets and aristocrats) and poetic symposia, moral and political propriety, and the intensity of Catullan satire. Such an intersection of concerns would be a fitting introduction to the poems that follow. At the banquet of poetry, Catullus will now toast Memmius and Piso with “May the gods and goddesses bring many curses upon you, you disgraces to Romulus and Remus” (28.14–15) and attack the generals Caesar and Pompey with “Was it for this reason…that you have ruined the world?” (29.24–5).
Catullus 116
Just as the beginning of a collection serves to introduce the poems that follow, so the end is a convenient place to reflect on the completed collection or to look forward to what is to come. Poem 116 can be read as doing just this when Catullus refers again to the effectiveness of his poetry as a social and satiric weapon.
Often before with eager heart I have wondered
how I could send you some Callimachean poems,
to placate you toward us, and stop your efforts
to send hateful missiles against my head.
Now I see that I have taken this labor in vain,
Gellius, and that our prayers have been ineffective.
We will evade the missiles you have sent against us,
but you gonna be pierced by mine and you gonna pay.
This poem touches on common themes. Catullus characterizes himself as a Callimachean poet and Callimachean poetry as requiring zeal and labor. It is a poetry of connection (prayers) and part of its effect is to be soothing and peaceful. He compares this tradition with the hostile weapons of the satiric tradition. Just as Gellius is a bad (i.e., unmoved, unreconciled) reader of Callimachus, so he is a poor maker of satiric missiles. And so Catullus will reply. One may easily infer that Catullus’ professed excellence as a satirist corresponds to an implied excellence as a Callimachean (certainly his preferred mode, according to this poem). Further, this poem recalls poem 1 (as well as poems 65 and 66) as a form of poetic exchange, recalling the social dimension of Catullus’ poetry (W. J. Tatum 1997). It is also an inverted dedication (Macleod 1973), which replaces gift-giving with vengeance and closes the collection (Dettmer 1983, 1994). And so, the poem ends the collection insisting upon the role of Catullus’ poetry in the exchanges of friendship or enmity, associating Catullus with the two kinds of poetry that have preceded, pointing to the potential vulnerability or ineffectiveness of merely Callimachean poetry, and promising to continue, perhaps with added satiric fire.
In all three of these examples, the interpretive “trick” is to read the particular circumstance (presentation of a book, ordering stronger wine, complaining about someone’s attacks) as a general reference to poetic values. We construe some terms as affirming Callimachean values, others as recalling a satiric tradition that is in some sense opposed to Callimachean values. Since the Callimachean program itself is oppositional and aggressive, it is always possible to read opposition to or additions to the Callimachean program as the way in which a neo-Callimachean renews the aesthetic, that is, as itself a Callimachean move. For example, “dryness” in poem 1 can be a Roman way of talking about concision as well as a witty playfulness with the Callimachean program: Callimachus opposed the tiny clear stream to the epic river of refuse; Catullus takes it one step further and values the dry pumice. The strength of this kind of interpretation is that it finds coherence in the poetic corpus reflected in a metaphorical and allusive language.
Background
In Wheeler’s classic study, Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry (1934), the term “programmatic poetry” is not found, although the function is clearly recognized. Of Catullus’ first poem, Wheeler says, “The poem is intended as a dedication to Cornelius Nepos of a book (libellus) of the poet’s trifles (nugae). The poet touches modestly on the character of the book not only by calling the poem ‘trifles’ but also in the phrases quidquid hoc libelli, ‘this bit of a book,’ and qualecumque, ‘however poor it may be’ ” (1934: 221–2). Others will call these references programmatic, but Wheeler does not use the term or allegorize the occasion and the language. For him, the poem remains primarily a dedication poem that incidentally introduces poetic evaluations. Within the tradition of “programmatic poetry” the same poem is primarily a programmatic poem that poses as a dedication poem.
Here is the beginning of the first article that treats Catullus 1 openly and directly as a poem whose primary purpose is to talk, albeit obliquely, about the poet’s aesthetic program:
We should naturally expect the first poem in a collection which is extraordinarily varied in subject and form and which is often highly personal, to reveal something, obliquely or openly, about its author’s general aesthetic attitude. Thus, in Catullus’ opening poem we might reasonably look for something more than the literal fact that this slim new book is attractive – in itself this intelligence would seem almost coy – and for something more than a justified dedication and a final request of a nameless Muse that the collection may live for more than one generation. We should expect, in short,…some sort of information about the whole collection’s spirit and style. (Elder 1966: 143)
Although Elder reads poem 1 as programmatic, he still does not use the term.2 In fact, the term which is so much in vogue these days first becomes current in classical scholarship in the 1960s. During this period, it is used primarily of those poems written by satirists in which they defend their literary, political, and moral purpose.3
During this same period, however, work on the relationship between the Roman poets and Callimachus was beginning to have a major impact.4 By the mid-1970s, scholars had become attuned to the learned style of allusion that would shape Roman poetry from Catullus’ generation on, and by 1980 Gordon Williams devotes seven pages to “programmatic poems” in Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry (1980: 34–40). It was found that the values and terms of Callimachean poetry (learned, refined, slowly wrought, daring, concise, discontinuous) along with the metaphors that recalled those values (slender, off the beaten track, clear streams, small springs) frequently appeared in this new Roman poetry. In Callimachus the pure, clear water from a holy and undefiled spring is opposed to the turbid, rushing, muddy river of epic; the slender muse to the fat victim (see Knox, this volume). Allusions to this language allowed Roman poets to claim affiliation as neo-Callimachean poets and to refine and contest various aspects of that affiliation.
The discovery of this poetic language and the way in which it transformed Roman poetry created a veritable industry in “programmatic poetry.” One way to get a snapshot of this event, which continues even today, is to do a word search in a few journals. L’Année philologique records 4 instances of “programmatic” in our sense for the decade of the 1970s (none for the 1960s), a total that jumps to 14 in the 1980s and 22 in the 1990s; Classical Philology shows a similar pattern, with 7 for the 1960s, 12 for the 1970s, 17 for the 1980s, and 41 for the 1990s; likewise, Classical Review shows 2 for the 1960s, 21 for the 1970s, 27 for the 1980s, and 55 for the 1990s.
The reasons for this fascination with programmatic poetry are no doubt diverse. It is, however, useful to look at what the term has empowered. We have already mentioned its empowerment of the allegorical reading of minutiae. It may not be an accident that, just as the old New Criticism was gaining a foothold in the classics, classicists were provided with an interpretive tool that valued what was “in the poem itself ”: “Why these seeming oppositions? What may they intend to say to us?” (Elder 1966: 144). At the same time, their interpretation required a learned, historical approach to literary discourse. In other words, the two objectifications most highly prized by classicists (the objectification of “the poem itself” and the historical bias of classical scholarship) were simultaneously satisfied and made to rest on the authority of the poet’s self-understanding, which itself was a mirror image of the scholar’s learning.
But the ascendancy of “close reading” in the classics coincided with the demise of the old New Criticism elsewhere in the humanities. The mid-1970s was a time of new directions in the human sciences. Many were exploring the slipperiness of language, intention, and meaning. Few believed that meaning was located in the poem. “Reader-response criticism” and “reception theory” appeared; deconstruction was already rattling the nerves of the old guard. And writers like Barthes (1977) and Foucault (1977) were proclaiming the “death of the author” and questioning the author-function. When set within this history, the classicist’s interest in programmatic poetry was not just a late-coming concern with “the poem itself” but a reactionary impulse interested in limiting the inevitable slippage of language and in securing the authority of the author over his or her words. It was, in other words, itself a programmatic response to some of the most troubling (for some) and most liberating (for others) aspects of postmodernism. But it was also a new way of understanding what the poets of Rome were doing, and it was highly adaptable.
Defining the Poetry Book or Sequence
Perhaps the least controversial and the least interesting programmatic poems are those that refer only to the book the reader is reading. The first poem does more than that as it lays out a general aesthetic, but other poems, like poem 27 above, seem to introduce only a change in the contents of Catullus’ book. Another example would be the fragment5 attached to the end of poem 14:
If there will happen to be any readers
of my foolishness, and if you will not be horrified
to touch us with your hands…
Like poem 27, this poem can be read as introducing a new group of poems, the Furius, Aurelius, Juventius cycle (15, 16, 21,6 23, 24, 26), which indulge overtly sexual themes (Wiseman 1969: 7–10), or it may be read as marking the entire sequence from 15 to 26 as a series of ineptiae, “instances of foolishness,” ironically meant, of course (Forsyth 1989: 81–5).
A more complex and elusive example would be poem 65. In this poem Catullus promises his friend a poem, a translation of Callimachus. In other words, it is a poem that introduces poetry and talks about poetry. The poem also comes at the point in the libellus where Catullus begins a sequence of long poems in elegiac couplets (65–8) followed by a sequence of epigrams, also in elegiac couplets (69–116). In other words, poem 65 seems to be the first poem in a sequence or book of elegiacs. Clues like this suggest that it can or should be read both in terms of the contents of the poems to follow and in terms of Catullus’ general aesthetic. What can we discover if we do that?
Catullus mentions “Callimachean songs” in only two places in his corpus: poem 65 and poem 116. Since “ring-composition” is common in Catullus’ poetry, this can be taken as further evidence that these poems mark the beginning and the ending of a sequence (Macleod 1973; Forsyth 1977b: 352–3). Furthermore, poems 1, 65, and 116 all use poetic gift-giving as a way of negotiating the social space in Rome, a task especially important if one is a noble at home in the provinces, as Catullus was, but a newcomer with few connections in Rome (Clausen 1976: 37; W. J. Tatum 1997). One critic notes that poem 65 marks a transition back to more personal poetry after the epyllion, poem 64 (King 1988). Others call attention to the claim: “I will always sing songs saddened by your death.” Quinn comments: “Was the statement…retained by Catullus, as seeming to him the right light in which to view the whole body of his elegiac poetry? Not all of the elegiac pieces are sad in any simple sense of the word. It is true none the less that the gaiety of 1–60 is conspicuously absent and that a new sardonic note preponderates” (1972b: 265). Putting all this together, it becomes possible to read poem 65 as the first of a sequence of poems, one that announces a change in meter, subject matter, and tone, while declaring again the poet’s Callimachean affiliations and emphasizing the social function of poetry.
All this seems plausible and interesting, but it depends upon major assumptions about the Catullan corpus. What if Catullus did not arrange his own poetry in the order in which we have it? Or, what if poem 65 begins a new book, instead of a new sequence, or if the sequence 65 introduces ends with the complex Callimachean elegy, 68b, on Laodamia and his brother’s death? And, what if a reader refuses to accept the possibility that a poem like c. 85 is saddened by the death of Catullus’ brother?
I hate and I love. Why do I do it, perhaps you ask
I don’t know. It happens, I feel it, I’m tortured.
Or that a poem like c. 93 is in any meaningful way “sad”?
I have no particular desire, Caesar, to want to please you
nor to know if your skin is light or dark.
We will come back to these issues, but it seems useful to make one observation. At some point, “programmatic readings” depend upon assumptions that they can only support by circularity: e.g., poem 65 introduces an elegiac sequence because it is programmatic and, since it is programmatic, poem 93 must be read elegiacally. This is in the nature of a programmatic statement: it makes a general claim which requires (or compels) a complementary reading of other poems. Of course, if other poems contradict the claim, then either the programmatic reading is incorrect or it must be reread as ironic. This means that a “programmatic poem” does not tell you what you will find in the corpus or how to read it, but is the beginning of a relational activity: the “programmatic” language is adjusted to the reader’s understanding of the corpus and vice versa.
Poems about Poets and Poetry
In addition to poems that articulate Catullus’ poetic program by reference to his poems, there are those that can reveal the general poetic program by reference to Catullus’ community of fellow poets. Here, the poet affirms his aesthetic preferences by allying himself with those poets who are like him, and distinguishing the poetic practices of his coterie from others. Perhaps most frequently cited in this regard (beginning with Wimmel 1960: 130–1 and Clausen 1964: 188–9) is poem 95:
My friend Cinna’s Zmyrna, finally after nine harvests
and nine winters since it was begun is published,
while in the meantime Hortensius five hundred thousand…
in one.…
Zmyrna will be sent to the hollow waves of Satrachus,
Zmyrna will be long read by the white haired generations.
But the Annales of Volusius will die at Padua itself,
and become loose wrapping tunics for mackerel.
What marks this poem as programmatic is the references to Cinna and Volusius, the metaphorical language of style, and the combative tone. Cinna was a young poet of Catullus’ generation, one who had adapted Callimachus’ epigram on Aratus for his own purposes. In that epigram (27 Pf.), Callimachus had greeted Aratus’ verses as “slender writings, the evidence of Aratus’ sleeplessness” – particularly witty in reference to astronomical poetry. Cinna (fr. 11 Courtney) in his adaptation offers a book of Aratus’ poetry to someone:
These songs, the long night-watch by Aratean
lanterns, by which we know the aetherial fires,
written in a little dry booklet of light mallow leaves,
I have brought you, my gift, on a little Bithynian boat.
The night-watch recalls Callimachus, but the diminutives, the light mallow and the dry little book, recall Catullus 1. Elsewhere (fr. 14 Courtney), Cinna celebrates a poem by Valerius Cato, Dictynna: “May our friend Cato’s Dictynna last through the centuries.” This is significant because Cinna’s words again may seem to appear in Catullus 1. The last line of Catullus 1, plus uno maneat perenne saeclo , recalls, reverses, and even trumps Cinna’s wish for Cato: saecula per maneat nostri Dictynna Catonis. In other words, these are poets who know each other’s poetry and who share a common language and common aesthetic values.
Volusius, on the other hand, wrote the kind of poetry the neo-Callimachean neoterics had no patience for. “The Annales of Volusius, sheets of shit,” begins one of Catullus’ poems (c. 36), and the vehemence with which he rejects this poetry recalls the beginning of Callimachus’ Aetia, as does his language: Cinna’s Zmyrna (itself a recherché version of Smyrna) was slowly and carefully worked; it will live long and travel far. It will be read by the curling wave of the Satrachus River, which is the homeland of its own subject. Volusius’ poem, on the other hand, is associated with excess, haste, and quantity (a line is missing in the Latin and so we can only guess at the content, although the contrast is clear). His poem will not travel beyond the Po, a wide, muddy river, presumably near Volusius’ home. And his poem will not even be read, but serve to wrap mackerel in.
Poem 95 celebrates the poet Cinna and the shared values of this group of poets, just as it greets and predicts a long life for Cinna’s newly finished poem. Poem 50, with more playfulness, again celebrates the shared aesthetic of Catullus’ friends, but this time the poem takes the form of a challenge for more poetry. It begins:
Yesterday, Licinius, when we had nothing to do
we played around on my writing tablets,
as we had agreed to be pleasure-seekers
writing verselets, each taking his turn,
playing now in one meter, now another,
giving tit for tat amid laughter and wine.
Before 1970 (Segal 1970: 25), this poem was read as an occasional poem sent to Licinius after a night of drinking and versifying. But why would Licinius need to be told what they did? That they had nothing else to do? That they had agreed to be delicati (translated here as “pleasure-seekers”)? And later in the poem Catullus even says, “I made this poem for you, sweet man.” Today it is felt to be obvious that the language of poem 50 “contains the language of neoteric poetic preference (for example otiosi, lusimus, delicatos, versiculos, lepore, facetiisque, iucunde)” (R. F. Thomas 1979: 201). As this language weaves together passion and poetry, the language of love and the language of aesthetics, Catullus does so around the figure of “sleeplessness” – the delightful pleasure of Licinius and his wit keeps Catullus awake:
And I went away from there enkindled
by the pleasure of your wit, Licinius,
so food did not help my misery
nor did sleep close my eyes in peace
but restless and fevered, all over the bed
I tossed, eager to see the light
that I might speak with you and be with you.
Like a lover he cannot eat or sleep, but his love is as much for Licinius as it is for the poetic game of making little verses. The result is now the sleeplessness of poetic composition, an explicit value as we saw in the poetry of Callimachus:
But after my limbs exhausted with labor
were lying half dead on the narrow bed
I made this poem for you, sweet man,
so you could see my pain.
Catullus ends his poem with a request that Licinius respond with another poem, that the poetic game of the prior night may continue to be played, but now, it would seem, in public, since Catullus’ poem is a public production:
Now, be careful, don’t be proud, and, careful,
I beg you, don’t reject our prayers, dear one,
lest Nemesis demand her penalty,
she’s a vehement goddess, careful, don’t offend her.
The poem is programmatic to the extent that it celebrates the values of Catullus’ poetic community: love and passion, playfulness and sleeplessness as both the result of poetry and the cause of more poetry. It locates these values within the Callimachean tradition by emphasizing the small, refined composition (versiculos, cf. lectulo), technical experiments (ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc), an interest in emotional pathologies, but most of all by its playful reference to and expansion of Callimachean “sleeplessness.” As a challenge to Licinius, the poem serves both to recall aesthetic values and to present them in its own performance of wit, threat, and friendship. The fact that in many ways this poem recalls the language and ideas of both the introductory poem 1 (lepor = lepidus, ludere = nugae, diminutives, stylistic refinement, the importance of friends and the exchange of poetry) and the opening pair of poems on Lesbia’s sparrow (Segal 1970: 26–7) makes it easy to read the poem as forming a ring-composition with the opening poem. Such a structure suggests that poem 50 ends a collection that was published as poems 1–50 and was the libellus that Catullus introduces in poem 1 (Clausen 1982: 193–7).
Our desire for historical and biographical information is pleased by such a theory, but we cannot ignore its deep dependency on circular interpretation. Clausen, who argued for this view, further speculated that poem 51 (Catullus’ famous translation of Sappho) had been left out of the original collection by Catullus because it was unsatisfactory: “and no ingenuity of interpretation will make it seem otherwise” (Clausen 1982: 196). It was added by an editor who connected the leisure of Catullus and Licinius (the first line refers to them as otiosi) with the final stanza of poem 51 on the destructive power of leisure. But what if we read the otiosi of the first line of 50 and the otium of the last stanzas of 51 themselves as ring-composition? For some readers it becomes possible to find in the paired poems a programmatic statement about poetry, passion, and society.
Poem 50, the argument goes, is not just a playful combination of passion and poetry, but rather a challenge to the serious world of Roman business. The poem “dwells upon the deliberately inconsequential activities, the frivolous – one might almost say, defiantly frivolous – activities of a privileged class…The word [otiosi], then, adumbrates both a mode of life and (indirectly) an aesthetic” and it does so because otium is indispensable to both (Segal 1970: 25, 28; Pucci 1961: 249–56). According to this interpretation, it is just this aesthetic, erotic life that poem 51 also celebrates and judges: it celebrates otium first of all by translating Sappho into Latin in the original Sapphic meter and it judges otium in the final added stanza:
Leisure, Catullus, is a dangerous thing.
Leisure delights and excites you too much.
Leisure has already destroyed both
kings and their blessed cities.
Thus, the irony of poem 50 is that poetic pleasure produces pain, sleeplessness, and a challenge that involves the vehement goddess Nemesis; the irony of poem 51 is that leisure produces both a beautiful poetic translation and a troubling and dangerous separation from the world of political and military accomplishment. “Taken together, 50 and 51 recreate and imaginatively affirm that mode of life – but without denying the pain and restlessness which may arise from its intensity and the self-doubt which may follow from its boldly asserted independence” (Segal 1970: 31). Once again we discover that the programmatic nature of a poem, like 50 or 51, depends upon both its interpretation and the interpretation of other poems. There is no way to choose between these alternatives, in part because they depend upon whether the reader judges 51 to be a failure or not and whether the reader thinks the book ended with poem 50.
But Segal’s reading of 51 introduces something else into our discussion of programmatic poetry: performance as programmatic. Poem 51 addresses poetry and aesthetics in part by being itself a poetic artifact, and by its position in relationship to a poem more explicitly about poetry, poem 50. Previously in our discussion, we saw that what a poem does may support and illustrate the aesthetic that the poem professes. Poem 95 is an example, about which Clausen says: “a polemical poem in the Callimachean style was not merely a confutation; it was, simultaneously, a demonstration of how poetry ought to be written” (1982: 185). Here, it is the performance itself (both in its position and in its artistry) that makes possible the irony that a poem which criticizes leisure follows the delights of leisure and is itself the product of leisure.
The view that what a poem does can be as self-referential, and so as programmatic, as what it figuratively says opens new possibilities for interpretation. Poem 36 rejects the poetry of Volusius, “Annales of Volusius, sheets of shit,” and consigns them to the fire. But this is a joke: Lesbia had said she would throw in the fire the select verse of the worst poet, meaning Catullus, if he stopped writing fierce iambs. When Catullus interprets “the worst poet” to be Volusius, it is both a joke on Lesbia and with Lesbia, because as they burn Volusius’ Annales they reconstruct the bond that connects them as people who share erotic and aesthetic values: the joke is “not unpleasant” (non illepidum, cf. Catullus’ book) and “not unlovely.” Furthermore, it repays a vow to Venus, who is celebrated in terms of a personal and literary geography that requires learning and personal familiarity. The contrast between the joke with its playful learning and Volusius’ poetry, “full of the farm and clumsiness,” is an aesthetic contrast that the poem celebrates as it celebrates poetry’s ability to win back Lesbia, to make the obscure and personal famous, to play with language, and to indulge life’s lovely comedies.
Performing the Program
Irony and comedy are, of course, performances, and when Catullus in poem 36 seems intentionally to misunderstand Lesbia’s vows, he presents himself, his world, and his aesthetic as elements that, like the clever slave of Roman comedy, escape the efforts of others to pin down or to make subject to their intentions and understandings. It is, therefore, not surprising to discover that many of the terms that we have been discussing as part of a sophisticated neo-Callimacheanism are also associated with the world of Roman comedy. Returning to poem 50, we find terms like lusimus, ludebat (comedy itself was called a game, ludus), iocum atque vinum (“jokes and wine”), and especially lepidus (the term for both the pleasant old man, a stock character in comedy, and the moment when the trick is successful), which also describes Catullus’ book in poem 1 and his joke in poem 36.
This raises a programmatic issue: since Callimachus was himself ill-disposed to comedy (R. F. Thomas 1979: 180–7), how does Catullus see the relationship between his Callimachean aesthetic and his comic persona? Poem 7, although it is not in any literal sense about poetry, can be seen to allude to the neo-Callimachean aesthetic as well as to perform a revision of that aesthetic.
You are asking how many kissings of yours
are enough for me, Lesbia, and more.
As great as the amount of Libyan sand
that lies in Cyrene, rich in silphium,
between the oracle of sultry Jove
and the sacred tomb of old Battus,
or as many as the stars in the still of the night
that gaze on people’s secret affairs,
that you kiss me that many kisses
is enough and more for your crazy Catullus,
kisses that the curious cannot count up
nor can the wicked tongue bewitch.
On the surface, this poem says little more than, “give me countless kisses.” But it says it obliquely, as if one were supposed to figure out the difference between the amount of sand in Cyrene and that of sand somewhere else, and it says it twice. It is this disjunction between what the poem says and how it says it that calls attention to the manner of the poetry as some sort of marker in itself, and, if the poem is reflecting upon its own manner, it is in some sense programmatic.
In fact, the poem’s mannerism is doubled. “Countless kisses” is first illustrated in highly allusive verse that names Cyrene, the home of Callimachus, with a mock-heroic epithet (“Cyrene, rich in Silphium,” rather like “Ohio, rich in Hondas”) and locates the sands of the desert by reference to the temple of Jupiter Ammon and the tomb of Battus, the name that Callimachus gives his father; then, again, in the old clichéd and sentimental image of countless stars. In other words, the first answer clearly parodies Callimachean allusiveness, the second seems to allude to the popular romance, and the secret nocturnal affairs of comic drama. And Callimachus himself is connected to both modes: in his epigrams, he both composed an epitaph for the tomb of his father (which would be a tomb of Battus) and rejected sentimental comic drama. If we choose to read this allusive performance programmatically, which is to say allegorically, we can arrive at something like the following.
Catullus asks what the limit to passion is. The answer, as everyone already knows, is that there is no limit. We can give the answer in the learned allusions of the neo-Callimachean style (with the appropriate degree of irony and playfulness – lepide) or we can repeat the sentimental images of popular comic drama (lepide). It makes no difference; the answer is the same and it is a cliché: desire is infinite, like the sands of the desert or the stars of the sky. This excess (“enough and more”) is imitated by the poem’s own form: two answers, both the same, overladen with poeticisms that make a clichéd answer seem obscure. The excess of kisses is, then, like the poem’s own excesses: the poem illustrates with poetic superfluity the superfluity of desire. By this example, Catullan poetry joins (albeit self-consciously) the excesses of neo-Callimachean allusion with desire’s own lack of limit to reveal, vivify, and play with what is common and already known by its readers. But there are two twists: to understand this you do not need to be a neo-Callimachean and the poem also goes beyond cliché: the idiom “enough and more” is commonly taken as the colloquial equivalent of “enough.” But it is just here, in an idiom that begins and ends the poem, that we find a greater and literal truth: desire is never satisfied until it gets too much. “Enough!” means “Too much!” Thus, what everyone does know is hidden in complexities, but what we need to know is literally in front of our noses. But that’s not all. If we pick up the Callimachean books to discover what is on the tomb of Callimachus’ father we find: “I am the father and the son of Callimachus” (Callim. Epigr. 21.1–2). Thus it becomes possible to read poem 7 as a programmatic performance that claims affiliation and paternity as a neo-Callimachean: Catullus gives new birth to Callimachus by playing the program and paralleling its excesses with the excesses of erotic desire.
This Catullan mode, which seems more concerned to complicate than explain Catullan poetics, can be found at work in other poems that seem in their language and their references to offer opportunities for programmatic readings. We find a particularly drastic form of self-assertion in poem 16:
I’m going to fuck you in the ass and in the mouth,
Aurelius the cock-sucker and Furius the asshole.
On the basis of my little verses, because they are
a little dainty, you think I have no shame.
A righteous poet ought to be clean and pure
himself, but no need for his little verses.
They only have salt and pleasure,
if they are a little dainty and a little dirty
and can incite the reader’s itch,
I don’t mean boys, but hairy old men
who find it hard to move their stiff limbs.
But you, because you read of a thousand
kisses, you think I’m not quite a man?
I’m going to fuck you in the ass and in the mouth.
Clearly Catullus is talking about his poetry and how to read it. Efforts have been made to deny the programmatic nature of this poem by declaring that it is not about poetry in general, but about Catullus’ “kissing poems.” Such a claim is not a fact, but simply a decision: the decision not to read the poem programmatically. One might similarly say that Catullus’ “pleasant new book polished with dry pumice” is not a statement about style and that it recalls neither the lepidus of comedy nor the polish and refinement of neo-Callimachean poetry. This only reveals the circular nature of all programmatic interpretations and the fact that they depend upon figurative readings.
Still, once we decide to read this poem programmatically, we have not solved the problem of interpreting the program. Some readers find here a poem concerned with power relations (see Manwell, this volume). By this interpretation, Furius and Aurelius have imputed effeminacy to Catullus on the basis of a poem (probably 48) asking for many thousands of kisses (if poem 48, then from the young man Juventius). Catullus, then, displays in this poem his fierce, competitive manliness. He stuffs the addressees with words and sexual threats. Their aggressive claim that Catullus and his poetry are effeminate is turned against them as they are made to assume the passive role. Catullus backs this up with the argumentative claim that good erotic poetry makes even stiff old men, who could not perform sexually if they wanted to, aroused or itchy. Poetry, then, is not about what excites Catullus, but about what excites the reader, and Furius and Aurelius have been bad readers both in their conclusions and in pathically accepting Catullus’ words. Thus, the poem claims that readers need sophistication, while it turns the tables on its (unsophisticated) readers and reveals the social competitiveness that even poetry cannot escape (see, most recently, Fitzgerald 1995: 49–55).
It is, however, equally possible to find in this poem a claim about how the power of poetry is not in the poem or the poet at all but in the relationship between reader and poem. In other words, rather than saying that “my poetry does do this,” Catullus says that poetry makes different claims depending on how you read it, and the successful poet deploys a rhetoric that turns the adversarial reading against the reader (see Tatum, this volume). Such a reading will emphasize the fact that, if it is unsophisticated to think that a request for kisses is a real request, then it is also unsophisticated to think that a threat of buggery is a real threat. In other words, as long as Furius and Aurelius continue their literal readings, they will be literally threatened by this poem. But the poem itself is telling them that all they need do is read these posturings as posturings. When they do, the threat goes away; it’s just a figure of speech (Batstone 1993: 180–7).
But is it? Catullus’ poem, when read in terms of its own logic, is trickier than it seems. If good, erotic poetry succeeds in making the incapable and stiff eager and itchy. But do they know that it’s just a game? Or do they, for the purposes of the pleasure of that prurient itch, suspend their disbelief as well? And what is the status of the claim that is not literal when that claim is found in a poem? And notice that, to make sense of this very poem, we have to assume that Furius and Aurelius really did attack Catullus. But the poem keeps saying: don’t be literal. The logical problem with the poem, and the feature that makes it a riddle when one treats the logic rigorously, is that one must make an assumption that contradicts the poem in order to get meaning out of the poem. Either one assumes that this time Catullus is really threatening in a poem where he says you must disaggregate poet and performance, or one assumes that Catullus is not threatening but joking and being ironic (male bonding, perhaps) in a poem where he says good poetry should produce the appropriate visceral effect.
As a programmatic performance, the poem refuses to make a univocal claim. It presents simultaneously two truths: poetic experience derives from real life, which it reflects; poetic experience is not to be equated with real life, which it only partially reflects, which it may reflect for rhetorical gain, for prurient pleasure, or as the kind of complex statement that creates a truth larger than truth claims can accommodate, namely that poetry (and every other performance of self) is a tricky act of revealing and hiding, of desire and feint. We are not who we seem, but we are not merely liars either. In presenting these truths the poet becomes, for those who want univocal reality, a trickster figure, teasing, threatening, laughing, slipping away.
Now part of the trick of reading programs into poetry is to find the program confirmed or repeated elsewhere. This, of course, is what makes the identification of neo-Callimachean values in Roman poetry so successful: there is an identifiable and repeated set of metaphors about style and aesthetics that continues to be used by generations of poets after Catullus. No one doubts that today, although there may disagreements about how far to extend the metaphorical language or in what circumstances it is self-consciously deployed.
Returning now to our elusive Catullus, we find him in poem 42 demanding the return of his notebooks from a nasty woman who, he says, thinks he’s a joke. For several lines he calls her a “stinking fuck,” but that does no good. So, at the end he calls her “modest and lovely.” Programmatic for the illusions of poetic assertion? Again in poem 49 Catullus thanks Cicero in language that parodies Cicero’s style and aspirations. Then he introduces a formula: Cicero is as much the “best patron” as Catullus is the “worst poet.” But this does not create simple mockery. The parody of Cicero depends upon its recognizability. Catullus is, in fact, betting that Cicero’s reputation, style, and self-importance will last as long as his own poetry – and, despite any irony or humor, that’s a compliment. So, we have both compliment and parody/mockery. As a programmatic performance, Catullus’ poetry engages the cultural antagonisms it thrives on. Catullan poetry, then, is the place where we exceed the limits of who we claim to be and where we spill over the boundaries of narrow logic.
Conclusion and Redefinition
It is time to return to our definition of “programmatic poetry.” Programmatic poetry is any poem or passage that can be read as making a general or self-reflective comment on the poetry. Identification of a programmatic statement or poem entails an assignation of intention and a degree of self-understanding together with a generalizable claim about aesthetics and value. In Roman poetry, however, statements of this kind are figurative. They depend on metaphors, figures of speech, performative juxtapositions (that corroborate or ironize). Programs, then, must be read as allegories, which is always tricky, since you are asserting that some thing (some word or image or act) is “actually” a reference to some other thing (poetic values): the book, the girlfriend, the act of giving a poem stands for or instantiates the aesthetic values of the poet. On the other hand, since everything can be a figure for something else, there is no limit to what can be read as an allegory or a figure of speech. Identification of programmatic poetry is both allusive and illusive.
This means, of course, that different readers find different programs, even contradictory programs, in the same poem. Each reading depends upon interpretation and upon the interpretation of other poems that corroborate it. The programmatic poem allows one to imagine the poet and his corpus in terms of a particular self-understanding, and requires one to read one’s own understanding of the corpus and the poet back into the programmatic poem itself. This is the familiar hermeneutic circle, and it means that you never know if you have actually figured out the program.
Consider poem 1 again. Above we found in it a figurative claim to certain Callimachean values and an implication that, just as Catullus’ book was being offered to Nepos, so the contents were being entrusted to him as an ideal reader. As our discussion progressed we noticed that the programmatic term lepidus (“charming, pleasant”) was also a term for the pleasures of comedy, and that Callimachus rejected the popular comic aesthetic, while Catullus enjoyed playing with it. This required a revision: while Catullus generally accepts the neo-Callimachean program, he also adds to it a Roman sensibility, one in which lepidus marks the fun and trickery of comedy (see further Newman 1990: 111–18).
But there is even more potential for revision. First of all, while Catullus describes the external appearance of his book with aesthetic and programmatic terms, when it comes to the evaluation of the internal contents he is particularly coy: you thought my “stuff, rubbish, trifles” (nugae) were “something” (aliquid); “whatever a book it is”, “whatever sort.” Second, within the corpus there is another poet with a lovely new book of verse, polished with pumice. It is Suffenus (c. 22), a man who is utterly deluded about the quality of his verse: “this guy’s more clumsy than the clumsy farm” (14). And then there is Nepos himself: a friend of Cicero and Atticus, member of the older generation, writer of prose history and moralistic biography, who may have enjoyed Catullus but preferred Lucretius to Catullus’ fellow neo-Callimacheans (Plin. Ep. 5.3.6). It’s hard to imagine that this man had any idea what Catullus and Cinna and Calvus were doing to poetic style and aesthetic preferences. Would he have heard the echo of Cinna in the last line? Would he have fully understood what a “new, slender, charming little book polished with pumice” might mean?
Catullus’ description does not allay doubts. To be sure Nepos is “daring” and his work is “learned,” but he also writes of kings and heroes, and his work is “laborious” (a term equated with the farm by Calvus, fr. 2 Courtney). When Catullus asks for immortality, he turns to his “girlish muse and patron,” while Nepos’ work is associated with Jupiter: “learned books, by Jupiter.” But Apollo is the Callimachean god: “Thundering is not my job, it’s Jupiter’s job” (Aet. 1.20). These features create a certain dissonance that is at odds with the claim that Nepos is an “ideal reader.”
If the poem is making a programmatic statement by way of reference to Callimachean aesthetics, Roman comedy, obscure and dissonant evaluations, and an oddly inappropriate addressee, it seems to be a fairly contradictory statement. But there is a different allegory available: Catullan poetry adopts and adapts the neo-Callimachean aesthetics, but its appropriate evaluation will depend not upon what the cover of the book suggests (after all, no reader but Nepos gets the polished papyrus roll) but upon the reader of the stuff inside; and Nepos is as good a reader as one should expect. He shares some values (daring, learning, reduction) but not all (he writes history, by Jupiter, and it’s laborious) or the wit (lepidus). Still, the life of poetry depends on readers who are daring, learned, reductive, and laborious just as much as it depends on readers who are new, and refined, and witty, and carefree. By this reading, the Catullan program is one that is open to many readers, each taking “whatever this is of a book” and discovering that it is “something.” It turns out, then, that the modest, self-effacing language, which lets the reader “fill in the blank,” is also programmatic.
This is a good place to end this chapter, since programmatic poetry can only turn over to the reader the task of connecting “this pleasant new little book…whatever it is” with the poems that follow. What this means is that the very task that programmatic poetry is being asked to do cannot be done. Catullus will not tell you how to read his poetry and he will not rigorously define his values. And, even if he did, you might still be just another Nepos or you might take him too literally, like Furius and Aurelius. This is, perhaps, why the modern languages are so little interested in “programmatic poetry”: What the poet says he is doing or thinks he is doing is not relevant because it never determines anything, and the meaning of the poem, in which the poet tells us these things, is always “misread” anyway. Classical scholars, who turn to this designation in an effort to fix and determine the meaning and affiliations of a poetic corpus, ignore the fact that such readings always require an allegorical supplement which can only be confirmed by reference to the interpretation of other poems (also supplemented).
The programmatic poem, then, is not a thing that we discover in the corpus, a thing that tells us how to interpret a poet or other poems, but the product of an argument based on interpretation. It is a heuristic device that helps us think in new and interesting ways about poetics. It entails an assignation of self-consciousness and authority, but it does not thereby halt interpretation. Its validity or force always depends on argument and interpretation. But this is not bad news. We should read more poems programmatically, use this figure of speech to help us to figure out our poet. And if what we find is incoherent, then perhaps we are on the track of what eludes the poet’s control or his self-awareness or the flexibility and capaciousness of his discourse – or, perhaps, the lack is in ourselves.
In fact, this is what scholarship does. One critic notices that poems 2, 2a, and 3 suggest a narrative of desire, marriage, and separation: the opening “triad” then becomes programmatic for the implied Lesbia narrative (M. Johnson 2003). In poem 85 the poet claims that he loves and he hates, but that he does not know why: the question and answer present a poet who will attempt to explain to his readers who he is and how he feels (Adler 1981: 3–8). Catullus is concerned with desire, and desire is a lack: let’s read the gaps that the reader must fill programmatically as allegories of desire (see Janan 1994). In poem 12, Catullus demands that Marrucinus return a stolen napkin, a reminder of close friends: but the poem itself memorializes both the friendship and the napkin and so is programmatic for a poetry that replaces a literal “keepsake” with permanent poetic commemoration.
When used as a heuristic device, reading a poem programmatically can open new understandings of the figure of the poet, and the characteristics of his corpus. The only thing that is really at stake is the coherence of the narrative we develop, the persuasiveness of arguments we offer for the figures we see at work in the verse, and the pleasure we find in understanding (or in the illusion of understanding). So, go ahead! Accept the challenge! Read a different poem as programmatic; explore a strange figure of speech or an odd metaphor! Ask it to help you imagine relationships within the corpus that will help you understand the corpus or even yourself more convincingly. And do this with good hope. After all, if there is a poetic program, then every poem should be in some sense an instantiation of that program: if you find the way in which the poem does that, you’ve found a programmatic reading of the poem.
NOTES
1 Basic bibliography up until 1997 is in Thomson (1997: 200–1), a good resource; it will not be cited hereafter for every poem.
2 Later critics will refer to his essay as elucidating the programmatic nature of the poem. Already in 1961 Elder had used the term “programmatic” to refer to Callimachean affiliations in Vergil.
3 In L’Année philologique, the first references to “program” or “programmatic” in our sense appear in the early 1960s: Buchheit (1961b) speaks of Horace’s program as an iambic poet and Anderson (1962) publishes “the programme of Juvenal’s later books.” A search of classical journals through JSTOR (Journal Storage: The Scholarly Journal Archive) finds nine references to programmatic satire in this period.
4 Despite the work of Wilamowitz (1924) and Kroll (1924), Quinn (1959) does not even list Callimachus in the “Index.” In that study, “Alexandrianism” is still primarily a literary overlay. It was Clausen (1964), following Wimmel (1960), who focused on programmatic language.
5 Newman (1990: 307–8) reads 14a as part of 14.
6 Poems 18, 19, and 20 are priapic poems not thought to be by Catullus.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
There are no general works on programmatic poetry. Those interested in pursuing this topic need background knowledge of how Roman poets refer to other poets and the stylistic language and aesthetic debates of Catullus’ generation. Much of that can be gained from this volume and the work of Wendell Clausen and Richard Thomas (see “Works cited”). However, the most useful exercise in further reading will be to note, in whatever you read, how the term “programmatic” is deployed by critics whenever they fall back on it, and to ask how it determines the reading of other poems and is itself already determined by the author’s interpretation of those poems, to ask what metaphors and figures it depends upon, and whether that metaphorical language is consistent, ironic, playful, and so on. It will also be useful to notice how general works of interpretation privilege some poems as particularly indicative of the poetic project. Whether called programmatic or not, these poems are being treated as programmatic poetry.
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