In \"Poetic Closure\", distinguished literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores the provocative question: How do poems end? To answer it, Smith examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem. First published in 1968, Smith's book remains essential reading in poetic theory.

"Poetic Closure. A Study of How Poems End", Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Chicago-London 1968, The University of Chicago Press, ss. XVI, 290 : [recenzja] / Jerzy Paszek.

and a more metaphorical form of lasting power. Another important passage comes from the c. 4 AD grammarian Nonius Marcellus. It is possible that he transmits a definition of monumentum that predates Varro’s since he purports to supply Cicero’s words from a letter to Julius Caesar. If Nonius’ information originates in authentic correspondence between Cicero and Caesar, there is an obvious terminus ante quem of Caesar’s death in 44 BC. The first attested epistolary exchange between Cicero and Caesar dates to 54 BC. Thus, the information, if genuine, is most likely to belong to the date range 54-44 BC, so at a time when the Republic was struggling acutely with its current and traditional identity. It is possible that Nonius’ citation is misattributed or fabricated, but the sense is consistent with Ciceronian ideas on monumenta elsewhere (see below on posteritas). Nonius says: ‘monumenti’ proprietatem a monendo M. Tullius exprimendam putavit ad Caesarem epistula II: ‘sed ego quae monumenti ratio sit nomine ipso admoneor; ad memoriam magis spectare debet posteritatis quam ad praesentis temporis gratiam’ (“In a letter to Caesar, Cicero thought that the proper signification of monumentum was expressed by monere: ‘I am reminded what the meaning of monumentum is by the word itself. It ought to look more to remembrance in the future than pleasure in the present time’,” 47 L). Memoria is, thus, again closely connected with monumentum, but here a temporal focus is prominent: as an ideal, monumenta are intended for the future (ad memoriam posteritatis), not primarily for the present.

Monumenta and Historiographical Method in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita

Ovid: "Amores": Text, Prolegomena, and Commentary in Four Volumes: Vol. 1: Text and Prolegomena; Vol. 2: A Commentary on Book One. J. C. McKeown

Forme e significati della narrazione bellica nell' epos virgiliano. I cataloghi degli uccisi e le morti minori dell'Eneide

In this paper I read the closing scene of the Aeneid through Aeneas' final speech, asking: What does it mean for Aeneas to say "Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas/immolat" at Aeneid 12.948-9? Drawing on intertexts from Iliad 22 and 24, I trace a sequence of thoughts suggested by the movement of Aeneas' eyes over Turnus' body. Quasi-cinematic features of 12.939-52 place the visible splendor of Pallas' balteus in tension with its horrifying past. Killing Turnus heals the resulting split between Aeneas' vision and his memory by reinstating the baldric's previous owner, binding Aeneas' and Pallas' lives together inexorably against Turnus' survival.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5184/classicalj.111.4.0463

Who kills Turnus? “Pallas” and what Aeneas sees, says and does in Aeneid 12.939–52

A series of links to the last verses of the Eclogues and Georgics characterizes A. 12.945–52 as a covert sphragis that reflects on Vergil's corpus. Through their description of Pallas' baldric, focus on Aeneas' relationship with Pallas and allusion to Eclogue 1, the epic's final lines continue the modes of closural reflection established by Ecl. 10.70–7 and G. 4.559–66. In doing so, they mark grief as a central emotion of the Aeneid and render distance and death a point of conclusion for Vergil's earlier works as well. This perspective emphasizes the tension between the necessity of Aeneas' last action and the emotional toll it entails, at the same time as it calls attention to the opposition between the frailty of human bonds and the courage of those who attempt to form them in all of Vergil's writings.

Aaron M. Seider

Papers

Grief, Distance and Death in A. 12.945–52: A sphragis for the Book of Vergil