Catullus
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Charles Martin
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Format: PaperPrice: $25.00
"Martin's book, funny, moving, smart, alive to twentieth-century poetic developments, is now the best book on Catullus in English. It constitutes another fine entry in Yale's Hermes series, which, with urgent timeliness, strives to put before sophisticated general readers humane but critically focused discourse on the great Greco-Roman writers."—Donald Lyons, New Criterion
"Charles Martin's handsome book seeks to emphasize the modernity of Catullus's poetry and examines the relationships of individual poems to each other. . . . Here Martin is at his best, writing with vigour and enthusiasm. . . . He illustrates his points, as he does throughout, with his own competent and conscientious translations. . . . This is a rare achievement."—Elspeth Barker, London Review of Books
"[This book] will certainly enrich everyone's reading of the poems. . . . [It] should send the reader back to Catullus with a fresh eye, to the Latin if he can handle it, but if not, to Martin's own superb translation, which provides the English-speaking reader with an equivalent of the spontaneity and artifice of the original."—Bernard Knox, New York Review of Books
"[A] stunning introduction to Catullus. . . . His work is particularly valuable for its critically objective attention to Catullus's scatology. Readers seeking an initiation into Catullus's poetry will learn very much here; and readers familiar with the poetry will find here new ways to read it. . . . As a contribution to the literature on Catullus, [it] is indispensable."—Roy Arthur Swanson, Religious Studies Review
"This is an immensely absorbing book which must be essential reading for all who are interested in the art, life and thought of the 18th and early 19th centuries."—Clare A. P. Wilson, RSA Journal
"Faced with poems that do not allow autobiographical interpretation, Martin is capable of revealing Catullus the literary artist, often providing fresh and worthwhile insights. . . . Catullan contexts are Martin's strong suit; in his guided tour of the Catullan corpus, he rarely discusses a poem before commenting on the social, political, or artistic conditions from which it arises. If only for these reasons, Martin's book is a fine introduction to Catullus's poems."—Mark Miller, Sewanee Review
Publication Date: May 27, 1992
