The poet as reader of his works: Ovid’s reception in the Tristia

Abstract

This paper investigates the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ars amatoria and Tristia in meta-literary passages of “Tristia”, where Ovid becomes a reader of his own works. In this first collection of exile elegies, the first-person speaker, commenting on his verses, adopts two different kinds of reception of his works: sometimes he considers the poetic text as truth and performs biographical readings, sometimes he remarks its fictional nature and proposes a distinction between life and poetry. Thus, we intend to show how the first-person speaker, proposing and performing different kinds of literary interpretation, actually makes rich discussions about writing poetry and about poetic reception.