Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry

Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry

Williams, Gordon Willis

Hardcover

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0300024568
ISBN13: 9780300024562
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Sep 1 1980
Pages: 316
Weight: 1.38
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
It has long been assumed that the language of Roman poetry was constructed under the dictates of elaborately defined rules of rhetoric, and its content determined according to the system of comparable classifications called invention. This belief has persisted in spite of the difficulty of fitting the works of Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, and Tibullus into such a rigid scheme. In this book Gordon Williams demonstrates that, although Ovid and his successors did indeed assimilate their poetry to the rhetorical rules devised for prose, the earlier poets employed a quite different method. Williams sees this method as falling into either a metaphorical or metonymic mode, both of which permitted the poet to say one thing and mean another. Delicate and often startling transitions of thought could be grasped-though not necessarily on first reading-by readers assumed by the poet to have a special access to the poet's process of thought. This access presupposed similarities of education, social position, and sympathetic understanding. Through close analyses of many poems, Williams shows how poets in the fifty years before Horace's death exploited metaphor, metonymy, and a third device that he calls thematic anticipation to evoke subtle associations of thought. In doing so he elucidates problems of Latin poems that have been generally misunderstood almost since they day they were written.

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