"O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, I never indulge in poetics - Unless I am down with rheumatics"
About this Quote
Time collapses into a wink here: Ennius hails an "unseen, unborn, unknown" reader, then immediately punctures the grandeur with a groan about rheumatics. The move is slyly modern. First he performs posterity, summoning a future audience as if literature were a message in a bottle; then he undercuts the whole ceremony by admitting that poetry is, for him, a flare fired only when the body misbehaves.
The intent feels double. On the surface, it is a self-deprecating epigram: the great poet as reluctant versifier, dragged into art by aches. Underneath, it is a canny bit of reputation management. Roman literary culture prized toughness, utility, masculine composure; lyric indulgence could look like softness. By making "poetics" an exception triggered by illness, Ennius frames his art not as fussy ornament but as an involuntary symptom, a pressure valve. He gets to be refined without seeming precious.
The "sweet English tongue" is an obvious anachronism in transmission, but it actually clarifies what Ennius is doing: he imagines the poem surviving translation, outliving its language, traveling into alien mouths. That future-facing address is the real boast, disguised as humility. He is saying: you are reading me in a world I cannot picture, and I have still reached you.
Rheumatics, finally, supplies the punchline and the human scale. Poetry enters not through lofty inspiration but through pain, boredom, confinement - the oldest patronage system there is: the body forcing the mind to make something out of time.
The intent feels double. On the surface, it is a self-deprecating epigram: the great poet as reluctant versifier, dragged into art by aches. Underneath, it is a canny bit of reputation management. Roman literary culture prized toughness, utility, masculine composure; lyric indulgence could look like softness. By making "poetics" an exception triggered by illness, Ennius frames his art not as fussy ornament but as an involuntary symptom, a pressure valve. He gets to be refined without seeming precious.
The "sweet English tongue" is an obvious anachronism in transmission, but it actually clarifies what Ennius is doing: he imagines the poem surviving translation, outliving its language, traveling into alien mouths. That future-facing address is the real boast, disguised as humility. He is saying: you are reading me in a world I cannot picture, and I have still reached you.
Rheumatics, finally, supplies the punchline and the human scale. Poetry enters not through lofty inspiration but through pain, boredom, confinement - the oldest patronage system there is: the body forcing the mind to make something out of time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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