The poetic ethos of some Tibullan imagines

Abstract

The construction and suggestion of images, whether they have the degree of vividness delivered by ekphrasis or not, are resources profusely used in almost all Latin poetry. Therefore, not even Tibullus and his well-known conciseness and simplicity could have overlooked the elaboration of “pictures made of words” and verbal scenes that establish, collaborate or broaden the poetic nature of his poems. After all, the idea enunciated by Simonides that “poetry is talking painting and painting is silent poetry” seems to have been common since the ancient times, and the Horatian ut pictura poesis is perhaps its most memorable and celebrated reflection. It is also noteworthy to observe that some of the modern concepts on the same matter corroborate the perceptions and intuitions of ancient writers in a seemingly perfect way. For example, to the Greimasian semiotics, figurative signs are transportable to and translatable into any natural language, (because it is an attribute of this – and of this only – semiotic system to be able to encode all the others) and furthermore they are universal abstract categories, a fact that facilitates and enables the transition from one system to another. One must agree, however, that painting verbal images in poetry is another resource that a poet may apply to create homologies between expression and content, which are designed to achieve an effect of permanence for the poetic message, by concentrating sense in precise and concise lexical investments. This idea finds support and consecutiveness in this thought: “No poem is ever written for its story line’s sake only […]” (Brodsky 1986, 47). This text proposes, therefore, to read certain passages of those Tibullan elegies in which the construction of images prevails, in order to investigate their poetic features, that is to see how the verbal plane gives them certain effects of reality as concreteness, contrast, etc.