SOURCE: An introduction to Catullus, edited and translated by G. P. Goold, Duckworth, 1983, pp. 1-18.

In the following excerpt, Goold emphasizes Catullus's role as a pioneer in the crafting of effective poetic diction in classical poetry.

[Poets] from Ennius onwards had successfully clothed Greek literary forms in a Latin dress but had conspicuously failed to match their originals in elegance and beauty of language. This failure the neoterics sought to redeem, taking as their models the poetry of Ptolemaic Alexandria and of Callimachus in particular. l hey imitated not only formal features like artistic word-order and prosodical precision but also the poetic ideology of their models, who discarded the major genres of drama and epic in favour of compositions on a smaller and even miniature scale, for in these every line and every word could be carefully crafted and the proportions of the whole meticulously calculated. No less...