Genre and Real Life in Latin Poetry

Abstract

As long as poetry has existed, men. have wondered and argued about its relationship to reality. The Muses, meeting Hesiod beneath Mount Helicon, told him that they knew how to tell many lies that sounded like truth; Solon and Pindar echo the chastening refrain, and Plato and Aristotle are concerned to find new answers to the hoary problem. Poetry is in fact a very slippery stuff, which seems to turn into something else as we try to comprehend it; like Proteus, it can turn under our grasp into a raging fire—the revolutionary Marxist view, perhaps; or a wild beast—the Freudian id , as it might be; or, most commonly, into a stream of water, which flows away to nothing between our hands.