Neoteric

The Neotericoi (Greek νεωτερικοί "new poets"), Neoterics or the Neoteric period refers to avant-garde poets and their poetry, specifically those Greek and Latin poets in the Hellenistic Period (323 BC onwards) who propagated a new style of Greek poetry, deliberately turning away from the classical Homeric epic poetry.

Their poems featured small-scale personal themes, instead of the feats of ancient heroes and gods. Although these poems might seem to address superficial subjects, they are subtle and accomplished works of art.

Greek Neoterics

The most famous of these were the Alexandrian Greeks Callimachus, the author of many epigrams, and Theocritus, a bucolic poet from Sicily.

Callimachus opened a school in the suburbs of Alexandria, and some of the most distinguished grammarians and poets were his pupils.

Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. However, these should be handled with some caution, since some of the poems (Idylls) commonly attributed to him have little claim to authenticity. It is clear that at a very early date two collections were made, one of which included of doubtful poems and formed a corpus of bucolic poetry, while the other was confined to those works which were considered to be by Theocritus himself.

For further information on these poets and their movement, go to the Alexandrian movement section below.

Latin Neoterics

Influenced by the Greek Neoterics, the Latin Neoterics or poetae novi (writing in the 1st century BC) rejected traditional social and literary norms. Their poetry is characterized by tight construction, a playful use of genre, punning, and complex allusions. The most significant surviving Latin Neoteric is Catullus. The modern edition of his works derives from a single codex, which appeared in the 14th century in his hometown of Verona, but now is lost. His poetry exemplifies the elegant vocabulary, meter, and sound, which the Neoterics sought, while balancing it with the equally important allusive element of their style.

Latin poets normally classified as neoterics are Catullus and his fellow poets such as Helvius Cinna, Publius Valerius Cato, Marcus Furius Bibaculus, Quintus Cornificius etc. Some neoteric stylistic features can also be seen in the works of Virgil, who was one generation younger than the poetae novi. They were occasionally the subject of scorn from older, more traditionally minded Romans such as Cicero.

Apart from the poems of Catullus, little of the Latin New Poets' work survives, not enough for any judgement to be made as to its quality. Catullus evidently had a high regard for the poetry of Gaius Licinius Macer Calvus, and Cinna A verse attributed to Furius suggests that Valerius Cato was in some sense the leader or patron of these young poets, and a fragment of Cinna's praises his narrative poem Dictynna, which, like Cinna's Smyrna, Calvus' Io and Cornificius' Glaucus, probably resembled Catullus' Peleus and Thetis. They wrote in a variety of metres uncommon at the time in Rome. For the rest, one has to rely on inferences from Catullus' own poems and argue as if Catullus' work were representative - in style and approach, at any rate - of that of the Neoterics as a whole. Perhaps the main distinguishing feature of the New Poets was their refusal to conform to the canons of poetic orthodoxy. They drew on native traditions such as that represented by the early satirist Gaius Lucilius and the comic dramatists Plautus and Terence. and by the fashionable short, witty, 'personal' poems written by men of leisure for their own amusement. In continuing these traditions they were being unorthodox, for 'high poetry' at the time was considered to be historical epic. More important, perhaps, than the extent to which they fused these native traditions with the Alexandrian technique by writing short satirical or personal poems in Alexandrian metres, was their adoption of an Alexandrian attitude towards poetry.

The Alexandrian movement

The Alexandrian movement, whose highest point was reached in the 3rd century B.C., is generally regarded as having been characterised by an exaggerated respect for mythological learning - reflected in a fondness for obscure allusions - and by a sterile formalism. If one approaches the Alexandrians with Romantic preconceptions, their poetry does of course seem shallow and sterile, their innovations the last desperate attempts of an exhausted literary tradition to recapture some semblance of originality and vitality. Another view is possible. An emphasis on technique can, it is true, be contrasted with 'inspired' poetry; but it can also reflect a changing view of the poet's function. Pindar, the 5th century Greek poet who explains most about his views on poetry, regarded the poet as in some sense a high priest revealing trascendental truths embodied in myth to the common run of mortals. Poetry was a form of liturgy, a mediation between the terrestrial and the eternal. This view of the nature and functions of poetry was no longer tenable in the 4th century. It is perhaps no accident that virtually the only poetry to survive from that century is that of the comic-dramatists, rooted in tradition, it is true, but equally firmly rooted in this world and in everyday life.

In Alexandria, Callimachus proposed a 'new poetics' which, from the fragments which have survived, seems to represent a search for a non-trascendental aesthetics, for a poetry whose validity would derive from itself and not from immanent truths contained in it. It followed from this that the poem should be considered as a constructed object and judged according to its formal qualities. The quality of a poet, he wrote - using the same word 'wisdom' that Pindar had used - should be judged not by the length or weightiness of the poem, but by the skill that went into making it.

Don't come to me for thunder, - he added, - go to Zeus: that's his job.

Formal perfection is the main characteristic of Callimachus' epigrams, and even his longer narrative poems were elaborately and carefully constructed miniatures. "A big book is a big evil," he wrote scathingly of Antimachus' epics, and he crossed swords with his pupil Apollonius Rhodius, author of an epic on the Argonauts.

Even erudition that has frequently condemned the Alexandrians in the eyes of modern critics can be explained in terms of the 'new poetics'. If myth no longer represents in any sense some kind of trascendental truth, the corpus of myth becomes a common stock of plots on which poets can draw for their elaborate and formally elegant compositions. Elegance demanded brevity and brevity demanded allusiveness, all the more so since myth, having become a story, could be elaborated in terms of the psychology of the characters. The more space was devoted to the characters, the less was available for filling in the background. The poet's audience was not the public at large but his fellow-poets, each of whom would be familiar with the events alluded to and could fill in the background for himself from a few hints.

Antimachus had his successors in Rome: the venerable master Ennius, admired and imitated by Cicero, had written a patriotic epic on the history of Rome, and Volusius had written a history of Rome in verse. The Latin Neoterics, without disparaging Ennius - Catullus in fact echoes him frequently in poem 64 - despised poets like Volusius, and in poem 95, which celebrates Cinna's Smyrna, Catullus repeats Callimachus' declaration of contempt for the taste of the masses.

Not only did the Latin New Poets adopt Alexandrian forms, they also adopted an Alexandrian attitude towards poetry. The slightest incident could be transformed into a skilfully-constructed epigram whose validity within their restricted circle would derive from its neatness and the extent to which the common stock of gossip - the equivalent, in a sense, of the Alexandrians' common stock of myth - was cleverly alluded to. The Neoterics could with stubborn irreverence insist on regarding these elegant and frequently obscene trifles as poetry, and the fact that the literary Establishment regarded them as worthless would only have reinforced their determiation to be different. Their claims to immortality were embodied in longer, more ambitious narrative poems in the Alexandrian style. It is now known that several were written, but the only one to have survived is Catullus' Peleus and Thetis (poem 64) It is safe to assume that it is mainly for his longer poems that Catullus would have hoped to be remembered, but one should not go on to assume that he did not take his 'trifles' seriously.

One result of the Alexandrian 'new poetics' was that a fresh role became assigned to the poet. Since poetry was to be judged on its own merits, the ultimate source of validity for a poem became the poet's own sensibility, and this made it possible for the personal poem familiar to a modern audience to emerge. The experiences of the poet became fitting subject-matter for poetry, and even in poems that were not immediately personal, the poet's own personality could now intrude.

See also

• Callimachus and Theocritus
• Prosody (Latin)
• Poetry of Catullus

External links

• Poems by Callimachus English translations
• A.W. Mair's 1921 Loeb (Greek/English): Google Books, archive.org, English translation only (HTML)
• Callimachus at the Perseus Project: Mair 1921 and Wilamowitz 1897
• Pfeiffer 1949-1953 Greek text: Greco interattivo (with Beckby 1958 edition of the epigrams) (Italian)
• Letteratura e poesia latina (comprehensive site with original Latin texts and commentaries) (Italian)
• Catullus's work in Latin and over 25 other languages at Catullus Translations [1]
• The complete poems of Catullus at The Latin Library [2]
• Summer Lyrics Short essay on Catullus by Morgan Meis of 3 Quarks Daily
• Poems of Catullus in Latin/English [3]
• Catullus: text, concordances, and frequency list