These are dreadful times, for which we need a poetry of dread. Ernest Hilbert's got us covered, in his new book Caligulan. I wrote a little something about it for Literary Matters. It begins like this:
“Little Boots” might strike us as an appropriate name for something small and cute—a kitten, say. But for Romans in a certain phase of the Empire’s history, it was a name at which one trembled. The man born Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus grew up among the legions protecting the Empire’s northern frontier, and as a child wore a smaller version of the caliga, or military boot, so the soldiers called him by the diminutive of that word, “Caligula,” and it stuck. Not long after he came to power as Emperor, he became notorious for the widespread and apparently random nature of his vindictive murderousness. His form of state terror wasn’t like Hitler’s, in which only certain categories of people—Jews, Communists, homosexuals, gypsies—were destined for massacre, and others could feel themselves safe, so long as they kept their heads down. Under Caligula, no one could breathe easy, least of all the powerful and well-connected, who dreaded the daily possibility of the garrote, or worse. “Oderint, dum metuant,” Suetonius reports the Emperor as saying: “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.” Anxiety became ambient, fear the atmosphere one breathed.
Ernest Hilbert’s Caligulan begins with an unusual preface by way of definition. “Caligulan,” he writes, emulating the style of a dictionary “Illogical fear that disaster, especially of a gruesome kind, might befall one at any time.” After giving several variations and examples of usage, he adds: “From the Latin appellation Caligula. First known use 2015, USA.” The word, as a term for general dread, is Hilbert’s own invention. And it is this sense of general dread, along with a series of failed attempts to escape it, that dominates his imagination in the poems collected in his third book.
The whole piece can be read here.
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