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Catullus was the leading representative of a revolution in poetry created by the neoteroi or "new men" in Rome. Rather than writing about battles, heroes, and the pagan gods, Catullus draws his subjects from everyday, intensely personal life.
--
Critical Survey of Poetry: Foreign Language Series (edited by Frank N. Magill), Vol. 1 (1984), p. 282

 

Gaius Valerius Catullus

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To later Romans Ennius was the personification of the spirit of early Rome; by them he was called "The Father of Roman Poetry." We must remember how truly Greek he was in his point of view. He set the example for later Latin poetry by writing the first epic of Rome in Greek hexameter verses instead of in the old Saturnian verse. He made popular the doctrines of Euhemerus, and he was in general a champion of free thought and rationalism.

 

Ennius

 

Catullus is a completely sophisticated, urbane poet, and his sophistication is sincere because his emotions were sophisticated. He expresses the spirit and essence of what we call "society".

 

Gaius Valerius Catullus

 

The authority of a king or duke, territorial limits to episcopal sees, and personal freedom—are all directly rooted in the soil, even though these forces competed, and still do, for ascendancy. If it is clear now that it was the most purely Nordic Germanic states, peoples and tribes which most consistently and resolutely defended themselves against the assault on everything organic by Roman ecumenical conformism, then we shall be able to see that even before the great victorious awakening of those forces from the hypnotic influence of Rome and the Levant, there was an heroic struggle in progress directly linked to the still "pagan" Teutons. The history of the Albigensians, Waldenses, Cathars, Arnoldists, Stedingers, Huguenots, the reformed church and the Lutherans, as well as of the martyrs of free research and the heroes of Nordic philosophy, draws an edifying picture of a gigantic contest for character values, those prerequisites of soul and spirit without the assertion of which there could have been neither European nor national culture.

 

Alfred Rosenberg

 

Catullus was the first Roman who imitated with success the Greek writers, and introduced their numbers among the Latins.

 

Gaius Valerius Catullus

 

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

 

William Butler Yeats