Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84-ca. 54 BC) was a Roman lyric poet. He is best known for the intense poems which reflect various stages in his love affair with "Lesbia." Catullus belonged to a circle of neoteroi, or "new poets," who used as their models...

The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus has had two lives. In Rome, Catullus and his generation, the "new poets," played an essential role in the development of Augustan poetry. They helped to create the possibility that one might be a poet by...

Oh my God, I’ve stumbled upon what seems to be a terrible literary tragedy in the making. Or perhaps we’re getting what we deserve. But I feel I would be remiss not to alert the world of letters to the dire new twist in the...

Oh my God, I’ve stumbled upon what seems to be a terrible literary tragedy in the making. Or perhaps we’re getting what we deserve. But I feel I would be remiss not to alert the world of letters to the dire new twist in...

In the following essay, Quinn explores Catullus's poems that focus upon political and social commentary: those poems which, in the main, "establish a norm (if one can speak of a norm in connexion with a segment of society whose habits are often so abnormal), set against which the Lesbia affair stands out in sharp contrast, without any more needing to be said."

Wiseman on understanding Catullus's poetry:

… Why] should we expect his design to be immediately apparent to us? Just because he was capable of writing individual poems of such direct simplicity that they still speak to us face to face after two millenia, it does not follow that he was always simple, much less that his tastes and attitudes necessarily coincide with ours.

Below, Small examines Catullus's most ambitious work, "Poem 64," and draws critical conclusions about the poet and his view of the role of poetry as a vehicle of self-expression, self-understanding, artistic immortality, and power "to celebrate whatever may merit praise …, to punish the wicked, to expose the inept, to defend the helpless and to retaliate upon the ungrateful."