Silenced Voices: The Poetics of Speech in Ovid

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Silenced Voices is a pointed examination of the loss of speech, exile from community, and memory throughout the literary corpus of the Roman poet Ovid. In his book-length poem Metamorphoses, characters are transformed in ways that include losing their power of human speech. In Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, poems written after Ovid’s exile from Rome in 8CE, he represents himself as also having been transformed, losing his voice.

Bartolo A. Natoli provides a unique cross-reading of these works. He examines how the motifs and ideas articulated in the Metamorphoses provide the template for the poet’s representation of his own exile. Ovid depicts his transformation with an eye toward memory, reformulating how his exile would be perceived by his audience. His exilic poems are an attempt to recover the voice he lost and to reconnect with the community of Rome.