The Amores are above all the product of poetic fancy the poet’s experience with love of course contributes, and contributes abundantly-but it only contributes it is the element that serves for the fusing of his artist’s instinct with the literature of love with which his mind is saturated-the poetry of his Greek and Roman predecessors. xi., seem prompted by anything that approaches genuine feeling. No small number of them, indeed, are but slightly connected with love, and only a very few, as I. For all of his much loving, the poet of the Amores is philosophic in love, and his light-hearted freedom from its pains finds light and airy expression. It is exactly this absence of the serious that gives the Amores their peculiar charm-a charm different from that of either Catullus, whose passion is real, or Tibullus and Propertius, who also sing in somewhat serious strain. Corinna is only one of several loves to whom the poet pays literary court, and it is more than doubtful whether even she is real. Except in a general way, they are not even the expression of personal experience, to say nothing of depth of passion. The Amores is a collection of romantic poems centered on the poet’s own complicated love life. The reader will not look to the Amores for profundity of any sort, whether of thought or emotion.
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