Metrical Feet on the Road of Poetry: Foot Puns and Literary Polemic in Tibullus

Abstract

Throughout his two books, Tibullus cultivates feet, chains, and related images as metapoetic symbols to express both his literary program and his involvement in contemporary literary polemic between elegy and epic. Unlike Propertius and Ovid, Tibullus engages only minimally in explicit programmatics and polemics, but metapoetic symbolism reveals literary concerns analogous to those of the other elegists. In Tibullus 1.1, these symbols allow the speaker’s rejection of riches and soldiering to function also as a recusatio from writing panegyric epic for Messalla.

Tornando Indietro: Dante's Tornata and Metapoetic Returns in the Trecento Madrigal

“…55One characteristic example in classical literature is the use of the word feet as referring to human versus metrical feet. See Torrance () and Henkel (), as well as further bibliography cited in these studies. The clearest point of intersection between poetry and its own rhetoric that has attracted considerable attention in Dante studies lies in the problem of Dante's ‘beginnings’, for example, his obsession with the opening formula ‘comincia’ (‘[here] begins’) in Vita nova , or, on a grander scale, his series of ‘new beginnings’ woven into the narrative fabric of the Inferno ; see Gorni () and Barolini (), especially the latter's Ch.…”