Style
Catullus wrote in many different meters including hendecasyllabic and elegiac couplets (common in love poetry). All of his poetry shows strong and occasionally wild emotions especially in regard to Lesbia. He also demonstrates a great sense of humour such as in Catullus 13 and 42.
Many of the literary techniques he used are still common today, including hyperbaton: plenus saculus est aranearum (Catullus 13), which translates as ‘ purse is all full – of cobwebs.’ He also uses anaphora e.g. Salve, nec minimo puella naso nec bello pede nec…(Catullus 43) as well as tricolon and alliteration. He is also very fond of diminutives such as in Catullus 50: Hestero, Licini, die otiose/multum lusimus in meis tabellis – Yesterday, Licinius, was a day of leisure/ playing many games in my little note books.
Read more about this topic: Poetry Of Catullus
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“One who has given up any hope of winning a fight or has clearly lost it wants his style in fighting to be admired all the more.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Style is the man himself.
[Le style c’est l’homme même.]”
—Leclerc, George-Louis Buffon, Comte De (1707–1788)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)