Letter 3023: Your poem reached me and I have read it with the pleasure that work of genuine quality always gives, alongside the...

From: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, senator and orator To: [Unknown correspondent] Date: ~377 AD Context: Symmachus, Book III, letter 23. A letter concerning literary matters and the life of the cultivated Roman aristocracy. Your poem reached me and I have read it with the pleasure that work of genuine quality always gives, alongside the mild envy that quality in a contemporary always produces. This is the honest response, and I think you would rather have it than the conventional praise. The lines in the middle section — the ones dealing with the river landscape — are, in my judgment, the best you have written. They have a quality of attention that your earlier work sometimes lacks: the images are precise without being labored, and the meter serves the feeling rather than imposing itself on it. This is harder to achieve than it looks. The ending troubles me, and I want to think about why before I say more. There is something that feels slightly resolved — slightly too wrapped up — in a subject that I think resists clean resolution. But I may be wrong about this and I would want to read it again before saying more. Come to dinner next week if you can. We can talk about it then. Symmachus