small-crafted images

I had a stimulating day yesterday with my year 12 class at the CLTA's annual HSC Lecture Day. Here's a helpful quote which stood out to me from the session on lyric poetry.

The principal critical values of the new poets put emphasis on lightness, delicacy, smallness, self-awareness that could even be ironic as well as self-admiring, and sheer delight in wit, in small-crafted images, in suggestion rather than total description. Catullus and his fellow poets experimented with many new Greek meters and started the process of Romanizing them, a process which in the next generation Horace furthered.

(Anderson, W.S. Latin Lyric and Elegaic Poetry: An Anthology of New Translations)