From the introductory: The best of lyric poetry has been the work of youth; the work of Sappho, Catullus and Shelley, who died, all three, it is said, before they were thirty, but yet not before they had left written for all time their record of the thoughts, and the aspirations, the joys and the sorrows of youth-youth too, itself and love incarnate-"the glory and the freshness of a dream." Of these three Catullus, the Heine (as he has been called) of Roman Literature, was born, not inappropriately, at Verona, the City ...
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From the introductory: The best of lyric poetry has been the work of youth; the work of Sappho, Catullus and Shelley, who died, all three, it is said, before they were thirty, but yet not before they had left written for all time their record of the thoughts, and the aspirations, the joys and the sorrows of youth-youth too, itself and love incarnate-"the glory and the freshness of a dream." Of these three Catullus, the Heine (as he has been called) of Roman Literature, was born, not inappropriately, at Verona, the City of Juliet and Romeo, probably in the year 84 B.C. In a way the date has its importance, for the period was one of comparative calm. Great movements were developing and great ideas were in the air. But the storm of civil war in which the Republic went down, leaving the poets of the Augustan age to drift under the patronage and into the service of the court, had yet to break. Catullus was a child of three when "the mulberry-faced dictator," Sulla, was in power, and he died soon after Caesar had for the first time invaded Britain and five years before he crossed the Rubicon. In a word Catullus lived free and wrote free. That is half his charm. His father was a man of means and a friend of Caesar. Catullus himself cannot have been poor, for, in spite of some playful complaints of straitened circumstances-a mortgaged villa and a purse full of cobwebs- we yet gather that he had a yacht of his own and two country houses, one on the Gaida Lake at Sirmio and the other at Tibur, the Brighton of Italy. Of his boyhood and youth very little is known. The poems-and biography other than the poems we have practically none-contain a confession that, like Swinburne, he wrote verses at sixteen. "When first the garb of manhood was given me, when my primrose youth was in its pleasant spring, I played enough at rhyming "- Multa satis lust . But, like Swinburne again, at sixteen, or later, he too "had a bonfire...".
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