Saturday, September 21, 2024
Poetic Diction
Wendell Clausen (1923-2006), Virgil's Aeneid: Decorum, Allusion, and Ideology (Munich: Κ.G. Saur, 2002), p. 1:
‹Older
Our sense of Latin poetic diction, as of the poetic diction of any language not our own, is necessarily influenced by our sense of the poetic diction of our own language, and is liable, therefore, to be erroneous. Many an English reader has been delighted with Catullus' 'limpid lake', 4.24 'limpidum lacum', but limpidus is unpoetic, not, that is, a word used by other poets or by Catullus elsewhere (being incapable of hearing, of feeling, the word, we can only observe how it is used); the poetic word is liquidus.
