Abstracts Category : Other

Nox perpetua: reception and translation of Catullus in renaissance England

by Jessica Renee Myers

Emerging from complementary eras in similarly tumultuous political moments, Catullus of ancient Rome and the Renaissance writers of seventeenth-century England both inhabited a poetic moment fraught with sensation, sensuality, and an unbridled desire for love found in, and threatened by, the changing currents of time. The turn of the seventeenth century represented an era of chaos, rebellion, and recreation, and just as new lands were discovered and new dynasties established, so too were new poetic forms embraced and explored. As the name asserts, Renaissance England bore and then witnessed the rebirth of a cultural movement, and within it, Catullus found his poetic revival. Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and their poetic predecessors, although differing politically with Catullus, identified with the same nostalgia for national status quo that he had so ardently portrayed. These English poets found in Catullus, an advocate of the republic, an escape from their current historic moment to a Roman one very much the same.