Word: catullus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Empty House), is given Nietzsche's physical characteristics (a high forehead, "the brow of a philosopher," and a huge grizzled mustache. With the vitality of a dog grinding a juicy bone, Rosenberg goes on to extract from the 60 Sherlock Holmes stories strong influences from Oscar Wilde, Catullus, Robert Browning, Racine, Poe, Mary Shelley, George Sand and even Jesus Christ...
...comparison is the easiest form of criticism, then the reader can get a sense of Love and Fame by comparing it to Catullus. Berryman is much like Catullus, a poet with a gloating ego, harping on his sexual prowess and his reputation, dropping names and places, an impudent golden boy. Berryman catalogues his life in this book, and every day of it is made larger than life...
...Berryman is not the Catullus of the Lesbia poems. Most of all, he exhibits a distinct lack of tenderness, none of the possessive but touching love of a Catullus. His poems assert his genius, his talent, his machismo, nowhere celebrate the virtues of another. This is only fair, since Love and Fame is an autobiography. In it, Berryman traces his life from Columbia and Cambridge through an asylum to riches, reputation and religion. The book is in sections, each a stage of his life, and the poetry corresponds, starting brash and young, ending old and mellow...
...became a Poet. I translated other poets, among them Horace and Catullus. I read Robert Lowell and L. E. Sissman (I wasn't proud), and walked around feeling, and wondering when I'd first win the National Book Award. I began to sound like Lowell, too. Not that I could write the way he could: but I absorbed his diction the way I absorbed the rest of Harvard. And along with his speech. I began to mimic Lowell's aimless guilt and sense of inadequacy; I became tortured, at eighteen. I wanted to check into McLean. I didn't know...