Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must first obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. The historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
I invoke the much-abused Eliot because here, at least, I believe he is essentially correct, especially when we consider Propertius as an individual talent working within and furthering a tradition. For Propertius wrote during what was perhaps the greatest flowering of the lyric spirit in Europe (I use the term ‘lyric’ quite generally here), along with that quite different age of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. Perhaps no other Latin poet had such an overt concern with his relationship to the tradition, past, present and future. Overlapping with late Vergil, early Ovid, and written after Homer, Hesiod, Callimachus and Catullus (to name but a few), it comes as little surprise that Propertius' work is fraught with allusions to and comments on other poets and poetry in general — especially his favorite poet, Callimachus. In this paper I will examine in particular poems 2.1, 2.34B and 3.1, where Propertius devotes considerable effort to the delineation of his thoughts on poetry and poets. I will argue that these poems form a group which presents a consistent and coherent argument which establishes Propertius in an elegiac and Alexandrian tradition.