Abstract
The medium of poetry has long been recognised as a complex form of creative communication: experienced aurally, yet also materially and visually, when rendered in a written form. Its intricate nature lies at the core of the conceptual relationship between the poet and their art form, manipulated according to their specific agenda and cultural influences. Such a phenomenon may be defined as ‘mediality’, understood as the peculiar complexities of a given medium as conceptualised and represented by its author. That this constitutes a key component in the historic development of poetics, serves as the rationale behind this thesis: one which, when considered together with the additional influence of the 'lapidary' medial characterisation of Latin, is revealing of how broader cultural contexts can shape poetic expression.The thesis will begin by offering definitions of fundamental terms such as ‘medium’ and ‘mediality’, before investigating the unique and long-standing characterisation of the Latin language as ‘lapidary’ and unpacking the multifaceted affiliation with stone that such a term denotes. This will build on what Michael Roberts (in relation to ‘the jewelled style’ of Late Antique poetics) has identified as ‘the physical existence of words and of metre’: the building-block, tessera-like, nature of individual words, and the careful placement of such elements to create a minutely constructed ‘artefact’. Issues of monumentality and regular resonances with epigraphic text, together with further parallels drawing on gems and mosaics will also emerge throughout as intimately related.
Horace’s Odes and Ovid’s exile poetry will then be presented as case studies in the chapters to follow, as two poets whose contexts of writing – be that politically or artistically – prompt a keen awareness of their creative medium. The final chapter will then focus on the Late Antique poetry of Optatian. A reader (like ourselves) of Horace, Ovid and other works of the classical tradition, this poet’s literalising interpretation of poetry as a medium shows the value in considering not only his own arresting works from a ‘medial’ perspective – creations that so evidently put the ‘mediality’ of Latin poetry and its traditional elements on display – but also those of Horace and Ovid, in whose works a complex mediality is no less present.
The overall ambiguous ‘medial’ existence of the Latin poetic text will be a recurring point of emphasis throughout this analysis. The distinct medial natures of Horace’s Odes and Ovid’s exilic works (together with the retrospective literary and political outlook of Optatian’s corpus and its Constantinian panegyrical context), further encourage us to question the significance of the Augustan context of these writings. Though historical interest in conceptualising the medium of poetry is clearly rooted in a much older tradition, this thesis will conclude that poetic mediality and, in particular, a ‘lapidary’ sense of Latin, may have become foregrounded in this period under both cultural and socio-political influences – especially those centred on the significant monumental construction and epigraphic developments of the time (in scale of production, and in forms such as litterae aureae, alike).
| Date of Award | 1 Feb 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | William Fitzgerald (Supervisor) |