Laudator Temporis Acti

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), Poets in a Landscape (1957; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2010), p. 86:

Sextus Propertius is one of the strangest of Latin poets. I remember that, when I was at college, I fell ill and was in hospital for many weeks. In order to keep my Latin from growing rusty, as soon as I began to be able to sit up and read, I asked my parents to send in a plain text of Propertius—the poems alone, without explanatory notes. I expected to read slowly and meditatively through it, without the interference of any editor, as one might read Keats or Lamartine.

Id., p. 88:

Lying in the hospital, between the daily clinical tests and the visits of the doctor and desultory games of chess with the patient in the next bed, I thought about Propertius's peculiar way of writing poetry, and read on slowly through his book, mystified in almost every poem by the jagged ideas and obscure references which nevertheless seemed to accompany genuine experience and intense emotion. No other Latin poet I had ever read had prepared me for this cabalistic type of poetry. His emotions were strange enough—in particular, his blend of strong sexual passion with something like puritanism. His style was bold, elliptical, uncom-promising, intended for a small intelligentsia. But the most difficult thing to understand, even to sympathize with, was his habit of breaking suddenly away from violent personal emotion and introducing a remote Greek myth, not even as an interesting tale to be told, but as a decoration, which every reader was apparently expected to understand and appreciate.