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The Books of Catullus consists of a completely new translation of Catullus’s poems divided into the three ‘books’ some scholars have agreed is the right order of the poems. These ‘books’ are divided as book one 1-60, book two 61-64, book three 65-116. This main text is prefaced by six essays: ‘Starting Line,’ ‘The Flâneur: Catullus, Martial, Baudelaire, Frank O’Hara,’ ‘Catullus and Modernism,’ ‘The Question of Voice in Catullus,’ ‘The Accessibility of Catullus,’ and ‘Sourcing the Origin: Translations of Catullus since 1950’. The essays together have an aesthetic of their own, reflecting what I take to be the most important features in ‘the books’ of Catullus: the key feature is a flâneurist wandering. The essays are speculative and diverse in their enquiry, and are not only representative of the ‘matter’ of thought which was going on behind the translations, but also represent the ‘form’ and circumstances that that thinking took place in. So the essays wander through and around questions relating to the gaze, collecting, ‘occasion’ and voice, the modern and Modernism, the contemporary, accessibility and difficulty, coterie and the evolution and practice of translation itself, in general, and in relation to Catullus in particular. If the essays wander (and wonder) in these ways, as a flâneur might conduct his perambulations, they also reflect the ‘form’ of the ‘books’. The poems are anchored by metrical form, they ‘wander’ around, through and across other possible categorical orderings as diverse as genre (lyric, elegy, epigram, hymn, translation, verse-letter, ‘epyllion,’ etc.); theme (love, loss, friendship, rivalry, marriage, adultery, politics, sexuality, etc.); length (the poems vary in length from two lines to in excess of four hundred), and so on. George A. Sheets in his essay ‘Elements of Style in Catullus’ (Skinner 2007, 190) sums up the poems in this way: ‘the single most characteristic aspect of Catullan “style” is its protean character’. Other epithets can be added: quotidian, contingent, exploratory, speculative. The essays, therefore, reflect this ‘protean character’ of the poems in how they address the reader: they can be chatty, informal, formal, comical, serious, academic, intellectual (and intelligent), playful, precise, digressive, ‘occasional,’ accessible, difficult, ‘modern’ – all rich characteristics of the poems – in short the art of the poems can be found in the expression of the essays.

This dissertation examines the representation of self in the poetry of Violet Jacob (1863-1946) and Marion Angus (1865-1946), two Scottish poets who wrote primarily in Scots in the inter-war years. Until recently, many critics have dismissed the work of Jacob and Angus as 'minor' in its themes or significant only as it anticipates the Scots poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. The general absence of their work from print, and the narrow range of their poems appearing in anthologies, support the impression that their poetry is limited in scope. This dissertation suggest that in fact their poetry makes a significant contribution to the development of Scottish poetry. Their work builds upon Scottish literary traditions, interpolating balladic form and language into their lyrics, and drawing upon the rich folksong and dramatic monologue traditions as models for representing voice and self. Folk belief, too, informs their work, providing a symbolic background for many poems. To indicate the depth to their work, the thesis considers their poetry in a range of broader, interrelated contexts. By situating their poetry within historical, sociological, and literary milieus, and by placing their poems within a continuum of Scottish writing, one can discern key tensions underlying and informing their work. As the predominance of first-person speakers in their poetry indicates, Jacob and Angus shared an interest in the psychology of the poetic self. Each poem offers a different representation of self, highlighting what the poetic self utters (or omits) in response to the world around it. Drawing upon a range of contemporaneous commentary and contemporary critical theory, the thesis analyzes how both poets portray the self in relation to its interior sense of time, its conception of space, and its interaction with other selves. The thesis falls into two parallel halves - the first devoted to an investigation of the self in Jacob's work, the second in Angus's. Key similarities and differences in each author's technique become evident in comparing their work.