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Reading Latin Poetry Out Loud

Latin poetry. One of my main motivations in creating this website is to share my love of reading Latin poetry out loud with as many students as possible. Poetry, in any language, is a beautiful thing - and the same is true of Latin. The freedom of the word order, the word play, the rhythms of the line, all combine to make for a wonderful poetic experience.

The problem, unfortunately, is that many people are exposed to Latin poetry without reading it out loud. The emphasis is usually on the English translation, rather than in experiencing the poetry in Latin. This is a terrible loss! I hope that the materials at this website can help people connect, or re-connect, with Latin poetry in a completely positive way.

Getting it "right." Many people feel very insecure about reading Latin out loud in any form, and they are even more intimidated by the poetry. This is true of Latin teachers and students alike! A big part of the problem is the impossible quest to get it "right." Many people are afraid that they are not pronouncing the Latin correctly or that they are doing something wrong with the meter. But what you have to remember is that the history of Latin poetry extends over a period of two thousand years - stretching from the archaic Roman comic verse of Plautus up to the lovely poetry still being written in Latin during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Once you take a look at Latin poetry in this larger perspective, you realize that there is room for many different ways of performing the poetry, and many different ways to appreciate and enjoy the poems.

Quantity... and rhythm. Classical Latin verse is "quantitative," which is to say that it depends on the length of the vowels and the patterns of long and short elements in the line of verse. Since English does not have a vowel system based on the opposition between long and short, it is a natural tendency for English speakers to read classical Latin poetry as a pattern of stressed and unstressed elements, rather than long vowels and short vowels. This "rhythmic" approach to Latin poetry does not duplicate the ancient Roman experience, but it can result in a fine poetic experience for us, as English speakers. This is how most people today tend to read Latin poetry aloud, and it is more or less the style of reading that you will hear in the audio at this website.

Now, there are some Latin teachers who are firmly against the idea of reading Latin poetry in this somewhat "English" way. William Harris, for example, makes a passionate defense of reading poetry "as the Romans spoke it," and there are some people who have spent an enormous amount of time teaching themselves the highly specialized skills needed to attempt to recreate the quantities of Latin verse. This is a marvelous thing to be able to do! For example, you can listen to Wilfried Stroh reading Vergil's Aeneid Book IV for an astounding example of this way of reading Latin poetry based on strict attention to vowel quantities. It is wonderful to listen to - but it is also beyond the ken of the typical Latin teacher, much less the typical Latin student. You might think about it this way: not all of us are going to be able to perform an aria like Maria Callas, but that shouldn't stop you from singing in the shower - for the sheer pleasure of the thing!

Medieval Latin poetry. In the Middle Ages, people continued to read, write and enjoy classical Latin verse, but they experienced this verse in an artificial way. Because the Romance languages no longer maintained the system of long and short vowels which had made the quantitative meters possible, the medieval Latin poets had the same problem that we do when faced with classical Latin poetry. They really did not know what the poetry had sounded like to the ancient Romans! Nevertheless, they respected the traditional of classical Latin poetry and learned how to write their own dactylic hexameters and elegiac couplets by imitating the ancient authors and following the rules for writing quantitative verse.

At the same time, new kinds of Latin poetry emerged in the Middle Ages that were based on the rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables and on rhymes at the end of the line. This is the kind of Latin poetry that is most congenial for English speakers, since the rhythms and rhymes of these medieval Latin poems are very similar to the rhythms and rhymes you might find in English poems. Some poets even freely mixed classical Latin verse forms with medieval styles in the very same poem. For example, one of the best collections of Aesopic poetry in the Middle Ages is the rhyming Romulus. The poems in this collection consist of four-line rhymed stanzas: the first three lines of each stanza are in the medieval "Goliardic" meter (the rhythm of "Yankee Doodle Went To Town") ... but then the fourth line is a classical dactylic hexameter! You can see that this poet enjoyed the innovations of medieval Latin verse, while also wanting to show us that he was a master of classical Latin, too.

Neo-Latin poetry. In addition to the flourishing of Latin poetry in the Middle Ages, there was also a great deal of Latin poetry written in the Renaissance and later. In fact, some people still enjoy writing Latin poetry even today! The Latin poetry written in the Renaissance and later is often referred to as "Neo-Latin" poetry. For example, one of the sources for the poetry at this website is a collection of Aesop's fables in verse written by Caspar von Barth, a seventeenth-century German writer who used the fables as an occasion to display his mastery of a whole range of classical Latin meters.

Benefits of reading poetry out loud. There are benefits to reading anything out loud in Latin - vocabulary lists, paradigms, passages of prose - anything that involves your making noise in Latin is a good thing! Poetry, however, is special, because all poetry is meant to be read out loud. When poets create poetry, they apply all their inspiration and imagination to the words of the poem. The work on those words, choosing the best word order, playing with the style, all in order to produce pleasure - pleasure for the person who reads the poem out loud, and pleasure for the people who listen to that reading.

In addition, poetry is based on artful repetition - and repetition is exactly what language students need to help them in their studies. You will find that Latin poetry, especially rhyming Latin poetry of the Middle Ages, is very easy to memorize. In fact, it sometimes gets in your head and you cannot get rid of it, since our minds are so readily attracted to these patterns of verbal repetition. So why not memorize some Latin poems? You will have a good time doing it... and when you offer to declaim Latin poetry at the next party you attend, you will earn an undying reputation as a most charming and most eccentric person. :-)

So, take the plunge and see what you think! I hope that you will find listening to the poetry to be something fun and, even better, that you will be inspired to read the poetry out loud for yourself as well. Don't be shy - just have fun with it. It is meant to be enjoyed!