I, the Poet: First-Person Form in Horace, Catullus, and Propertius by Kathleen McCarthy

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 337 false (Venus is not, in fact, anthropomorphic). On this novel reading, Lucretius’ Ennian posturing becomes the honey around the cup of bitter Epicurean truth: the poet draws his reader in by striking a familiar Ennian pose, and then proceeds to dismantle Ennius’ worldview and even, if we follow the poet’s logic to its disorienting end, the possibility of anyone being an Ennian poet. That is a thought-provoking argument, and I suspect that there is a good deal of truth in it. All the same, I want to express a reservation I have about Chapters Two, Three, and Four as a whole. As much as I am convinced that Lucretius’ engagement with Ennius is often polemical, I am sceptical that it is as purely and as ardently polemical as Nethercut contends (he goes so far as to claim that Lucretius’ poem actually “despises” Ennius [116; my italics]). Surely, on occasion, Lucretius invokes the Annales, not to utterly “obliterate” (120) its worldview, but rather to secure a suitably elevated tone in his own epic. And considering that the poet’s praise of Ennius at 1.117–119 strongly recalls his flattering invocation of Epicurus fewer than fifty lines earlier (1.62–71), perhaps that praise cannot be so tidily reduced to a performance of insincere, merely “provisional” affection. Lucretius, I think, can be a committed Epicurean without being single-minded in his feelings toward, and his use of, a non-Epicurean poet. But if Nethercut’s book focuses doggedly on the negative in Lucretius’ allusive relationship with Ennius, then that, in a certain sense, is a gift: for it ensures that there is much here for the rest of us both to learn from and to supplement. And indeed, neither my criticism of Chapter One nor my comments on (what I perceive to be) the book’s limited focus should suggest that Ennius Noster is something other than what it is: a major contribution to the study of republican Latin literature. The University of British Columbia Jesse Hill I, the Poet: First-Person Form in Horace, Catullus, and Propertius. By Kathleen McCarthy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2019. Pp. 244. In I,THEPOET, Kathleen McCarthy addresses the simultaneous overlapping and disjuncture between the speakers and historical poets of first-person Latin poetry. This book is not, however, a contribution either to biographical readings or to persona theory, but an attempt to “reformulate the terms of the debate” about the role of the first-person speaker (21), casting it less as an identity to be defined and more as a discursive tool that poets can and do use productively to create poetic effects. The book takes a method-andcase -study approach to Propertius’ first two books, Catullus’ polymetrics, and Horace’s Odes 1–3 and Epistles 1, first introducing reading strategies to identify and analyze the structural role that the first-person speaker can play and then applying those strategies to subsets of the selected works. McCarthy’s approach, explained in the Introduction, relies upon poetry’s dual function as literature in the real world and as the representation of a “storyworld” accessible to readers only through the poetry. The first-person speaker has one foot in each world. In the real world, inasmuch as he overlaps with the poet, he speaks for the reader’s benefit and controls the poetry’s discourse. In the storyworld, where he is a character belonging to the poetry’s implied “story,” his speech serves his own social and poetic agendas. The “gap” (9) between the storyworld speaker and the real-world poet positions firstperson poetry as both “for-us,” the readers, in that its form implies a readership, and 338 PHOENIX as “not-for-us” in its representation of a storyworld to which readers do not belong (4). Although we can easily elide this gap, McCarthy argues that Latin poets would have become sensitive to the tension between “for-us” and “not-for-us” in their own reading of Greek occasional poetry, since such poetry was composed for performance contexts to which the later Roman readers had no access. Consequently, she proposes reading the gap in first-person Latin...

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