In an interview on Love and Greats

Tell me about the poems of Catullus.

Catullus was a Roman poet who lived from about 84 to 54 BC, so he was a younger contemporary of Julius Caesar. There are poems that are funny and obscene, there are poems that are astonishingly beautiful and delicate, there are angry, hot, throbbing poems about loss, there are charming poems about his home and family, there are poems that are incredibly learned – almost T S Eliot-like in their dense construction.

I remember reading Catullus at school when I was 17 and 18, and I was particularly taken with the love poems. There’s a whole series in honour of his lover, Lesbia – a pseudonym that is also a homage to Sappho, who was born and lived on Lesbos, and who wrote so extraordinarily about desire. Most scholars now think that the real Lesbia was an aristocratic Roman woman called Clodia Metelli who is known from other sources as a powerful, sophisticated and somewhat scandalous woman.

In this series of poems to Lesbia we have for the first time in literature the sense of the arc of a relationship. In Sappho we have poems about desire but in Catullus we can see a whole love affair developing. There’s the tingling sense of desire, and then the gloriously happy, loved-up phase. And then there are poems that put a knife through your heart when she’s been unfaithful to him. And angry, brutal poems about his sense of loss, descriptions of how he doesn’t believe he can ever love again, or even go on living at all. Unforgettable poems.

Is Catullus the most accessible of the ancient poets to a modern reader?

Yes. There’s something very powerful in Catullus’s emotional directness. Certainly that was my experience when I first read these poems as a teenager. You read them and you think, God, that’s just how I feel.