Roman Elegy

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Elegiac poetry addressed a wide range of themes such as love, sadness, politics, and mythology. As such, it was a genre that allowed writers to reflect upon a broad range of the human experience, and, moreover, for the poets themselves to reflect upon their own representations of those themes. In some sense, this poetry is the most self-conscious art that we have from the ancient world, and this class will introduce students to poetry written primarily in the 1st c. BC by authors such as Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Students will become familiar with the ways in which poets create and innovate within the genre and within the metrical format of the elegiac couplet (a hexameter followed by a pentameter). Close attention will be paid to Latin diction and poetic style.