Introduction

The Introduction, “The Limits of the Possible,” presents the problems with the conventional reading of carpe diem invitation poetry as a low-stakes, playful mode. These poems’ pretext of erotic enticement is often stunningly belied: by a morbid preoccupation with time and death (with ekphrases of decaying bodies used to incite love-making), by an abstruse fixation on the meaning of virginity (regularly interrogated on physiological, semiotic, and ontological terms), and by an anti-theist denial of Christian Providentialism (if there is no God to judge our actions, why not have sex now?). A brief look at the locus classicus of the motif in authors like Horace and Catullus reveals the philosophical stakes of the Renaissance revival, in which the secular hypothesis puts nothing less than an entire belief system on trial. This introduction shows both the world-making aspirations, but also the terrible constraints on a mode whose primary subject is, ultimately, the limits of human knowledge and existence. The introduction outlines my methodology, both archival and theoretical, for this full-scale re-evaluation of carpe diem as not merely a vaguely erotic commonplace, but also a medium and a mode of cognition.