Antiquitopia

...writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark. (Ovid, Black Sea Letters IV.2.33-4)

Inspired poets' predictions do not fail of fulfillment: a new laurel-wreath for Jove while the first's still green! These are now my words you read (I'm away on the Danube, its waters drink for the ill-pacified Goths): no, this is the voice of a god, a god's inside me, it's a god that makes me predict and prophesy! (Ovid, Black Sea Letters III.4.89-94) Ovid claims inspiration...in a very literal sense. A spirit is in him, a god's inside him. The god possesses him. Poetic inspiration and prophetic inspiration are inseparable: each divinely inspired, each folding into one another. Inspired speech is heightened speech, poetic speech. They flow from the same source: Apollo.

I've been reading Ovid's Tristia and his Black Sea Letters , and this passage struck me in the beauty of its description of Love's decrepitude: Sleep, that common repose from cares, possessed me, my slack limbs were sprawled out the length of my bed-- when, suddenly, the air was vibrant with beating pinions, and the window creaked softly open. In alarm I started up, propped on my left elbow, slumber gone, driven clear from my thumping breast. There stood Love, one hand grasping the maple bedpost, with a sad expression, not how he used to look, no neck-chain, no hair-comb, locks in wild disorder, not neatly pinned back as of old, but hanging loose around his bristled jawline, wing-feathers ruffled (or so it seemed to me) like those on the back of some homing pigeon, fingered by too many rough hands. (Ovid, Black Sea Letters III.3.7-20) His description of sleep as something that possesses rather than a state is what initially drew me into the passage, as if sleep is a spiri...