Conclusion

Summary

To kiss and be kissed, which, amongst other lascivious provocations, is as a burden in a song …

Robert Burton, Anantomy of Melancholy (1621–51), Part III, Section ii, Memb. ii, Subs. iv

Janus Secundus, who made the lyric of kissing into a genre and thus explicitly adopted the ‘basium’ into the sphere of poetics, made much of the implied relationship between styles of writing and styles of kissing. His connoisseurship of erotic kisses—an amateur's profession of the bedroom humanities—is at the same time also the attitude of the poetic stylist, and of the literary theorist. ‘Diversis varium ludat uterque modis’, he proposes to Neaera: ‘Let us both play varyingly, with diverse styles.’ And so he does, with various kinds of ‘kissing’ in a range of metres and a range of moods.

In talking of his kisses, as even a relatively uncritical reader can see, Secundus was talking about his Basia. ‘Some say I give too luxurious kisses, not like those our wrinkly fathers learned.’ If the objection is valid, Catullus certainly cannot be numbered among these ‘wrinkly fathers’; but neither can Pontano, Marullus or Sannazaro: Secundus had situated himself at the heart of a classical tradition already quite reborn and fully fleshed out. Nevertheless he also claimed the kiss-poem for his own domain. He inherited a Neo-Catullan style which had put everything in place, or nearly in place, ready for him to make explicit the links between the act of kissing and the act of writing, connecting both to the generic fact of the established Catullan manner. These links would hinge on a simple, even a facile metaphor, the notion of the poem-as-kiss. But this straightforward manoeuvre brought into greater relief the poetic inventiveness that had surrounded the original kisses of Catullus—not least the tanglesome relationship between the kiss and the person of the poet, his moral and ‘manly’ character.

The kisses of Catullus were memorable; they attracted imitation. In the same way, through many ramifying permutations, the oscular themes and figures of the Neo-Catullan poets thrived in vernacular imitations. In the first place, the kiss was a useful image: just as classical precedent gave an excuse for licentiousness in verse, so the theme of the kiss allowed further scope for an ambiguous handling of sexual material.