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During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the Age of Enlightenment, neo-classical culture was pervasive. English literature in the middle of that period has been dubbed Augustan. It is not always easy to distinguish Horace's influence during those centuries (the mixing of influences is shown for example in one poet's pseudonym, Horace Juvenal).[nb 26] However a measure of his influence can be found in the diversity of the people interested in his works, both among readers and authors.[105] New editions of his works were published almost yearly. There were three new editions in 1612 (two in Leiden, one in Frankfurt) and again in 1699 (Utrecht, Barcelona, Cambridge). Cheap editions were plentiful and fine editions were also produced, including one whose entire text was engraved by John Pine in copperplate. The poet James Thomson owned five editions of Horace's work and the physician James Douglas had five hundred books with Horace-related titles. Horace was often commended in periodicals such as The Spectator, as a hallmark of good judgement, moderation and manliness, a focus for moralising.[nb 27] His verses offered a fund of mottoes, such as simplex munditiis, (elegance in simplicity) splendide mendax (nobly untruthful.), sapere aude, nunc est bibendum, carpe diem (the latter perhaps being the only one still in common use today),[91] quoted even in works as prosaic as Edmund Quincy's A treatise of hemp-husbandry (1765). The fictional hero Tom Jones recited his verses with feeling.[106] His works were also used to justify commonplace themes, such as patriotic obedience, as in James Parry's English lines from an Oxford University collection in 1736:[107] What friendly Muse will teach my Lays To emulate the Roman fire? Justly to sound a Caeser's praise Demands a bold Horatian lyre. Horatian-style lyrics were increasingly typical of Oxford and Cambridge verse collections for this period, most of them in Latin but some like the previous ode in English. John Milton's Lycidas first appeared in such a collection. It has few Horatian echoes[nb 28] yet Milton's associations with Horace were lifelong. He composed a controversial version of Odes 1.5, and Paradise Lost includes references to Horace's 'Roman' Odes 3.1–6 (Book 7 for example begins with echoes of Odes 3.4).[108] Yet Horace's lyrics could offer inspiration to libertines as well as moralists, and neo-Latin sometimes served as a kind of discrete veil for the risqué. Thus for example Benjamin Loveling authored a catalogue of Drury Lane and Covent Garden prostitutes, in Sapphic stanzas, and an encomium for a dying lady "of salacious memory".[109] Some Latin imitations of Horace were politically subversive, such as a marriage ode by Anthony Alsop that included a rallying cry for the Jacobite cause. On the other hand, Andrew Marvell took inspiration from Horace's Odes 1.37 to compose his English masterpiece Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, in which subtly nuanced reflections on the execution of Charles I echo Horace's ambiguous response to the death of Cleopatra (Marvell's ode was suppressed in spite of its subtlety and only began to be widely published in 1776). Samuel Johnson took particular pleasure in reading The Odes.[nb 29] Alexander Pope wrote direct Imitations of Horace (published with the original Latin alongside) and also echoed him in Essays and The Rape of the Lock. He even emerged as "a quite Horatian Homer" in his translation of the Iliad.[110] Horace appealed also to female poets, such as Anna Seward (Original sonnets on various subjects, and odes paraphrased from Horace, 1799) and Elizabeth Tollet, who composed a Latin ode in Sapphic meter to celebrate her brother's return from overseas, with tea and coffee substituted for the wine of Horace's sympotic settings: Quos procax nobis numeros, jocosque Musa dictaret? mihi dum tibique Temperent baccis Arabes, vel herbis Pocula Seres[111] What verses and jokes might the bold Muse dictate? while for you and me Arabs flavour our cups with beans Or Chinese with leaves.[112] Horace's Ars Poetica is second only to Aristotle's Poetics in its influence on literary theory and criticism. Milton recommended both works in his treatise of Education.[113] Horace's Satires and Epistles however also had a huge impact, influencing theorists and critics such as John Dryden.[114] There was considerable debate over the value of different lyrical forms for contemporary poets, as represented on one hand by the kind of four-line stanzas made familiar by Horace's Sapphic and Alcaic Odes and, on the other, the loosely structured Pindarics associated with the odes of Pindar. Translations occasionally involved scholars in the dilemmas of censorship. Thus Christopher Smart entirely omitted Odes 4.10 and re-numbered the remaining odes. He also removed the ending of Odes 4.1. Thomas Creech printed Epodes 8 and 12 in the original Latin but left out their English translations. Philip Francis left out both the English and Latin for those same two epodes, a gap in the numbering the only indication that something was amiss. French editions of Horace were influential in England and these too were regularly bowdlerized. Most European nations had their own 'Horaces': thus for example Friedrich von Hagedorn was called The German Horace and Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski The Polish Horace (the latter was much imitated by English poets such as Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley). Pope Urban VIII wrote voluminously in Horatian meters, including an ode on gout.[115] 19th century, on The 'Von Trapp Family': a semi-professional cast in a small town performance of The Sound of Music, Georgia, USA. The solfege system (Do, Re, Mi), which is the theme of a song by the Von Trapp children, is just a small sample of Horace's all-pervasive influence on western culture, even among people who might never have heard the name Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Horace maintained a central role in the education of English-speaking elites right up until the 1960s.[116] A pedantic emphasis on the formal aspects of language-learning at the expense of literary appreciation may have made him unpopular in some quarters[117] yet it also confirmed his influence—a tension in his reception that underlies Byron's famous lines from Childe Harold (Canto iv, 77):[118] Then farewell, Horace, whom I hated so Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse To understand, not feel thy lyric flow, To comprehend, but never love thy verse. William Wordsworth's mature poetry, including the preface to Lyrical Ballads, reveals Horace's influence in its rejection of false ornament[119] and he once expressed "a wish / to meet the shade of Horace...".[nb 30] John Keats echoed the opening of Horace's Epodes 14 in the opening lines of Ode to a Nightingale.[nb 31] The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honorary English gentleman. William Thackery produced a version of Odes 1.38 in which Horace's questionable 'boy' became 'Lucy', and Gerard Manley Hopkins translated the boy innocently as 'child'. Horace was translated by Sir Theodore Martin (biographer of Prince Albert) but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic Odes 1.25 and Epodes 8 and 12. Lord Lytton produced a popular translation and William Gladstone also wrote translations during his last days as Prime Minister.[120] Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though formally derived from the Persian ruba'i, nevertheless shows a strong Horatian influence, since, as one modern scholar has observed,"...the quatrains inevitably recall the stanzas of the 'Odes', as does the narrating first person of the world-weary, ageing Epicurean Omar himself, mixing sympotic exhortation and 'carpe diem' with splendid moralising and 'memento mori' nihilism."[nb 32] Matthew Arnold advised a friend in verse not to worry about politics, an echo of Odes 2.11, yet later became a critic of Horace's inadequacies relative to Greek poets, as role models of Victorian virtues, observing: "If human life were complete without faith, without enthusiasm, without energy, Horace...would be the perfect interpreter of human life."[121] Christina Rossetti composed a sonnet depicting a woman willing her own death steadily, drawing on Horace's depiction of 'Glycera' in Odes 1.19.5–6 and Cleopatra in Odes 1.37.[nb 33] A. E. Housman considered Odes 4.7, in Archilochian couplets, the most beautiful poem of antiquity[122] and yet he generally shared Horace's penchant for quatrains, being readily adapted to his own elegiac and melancholy strain.[123] The most famous poem of Ernest Dowson took its title and its heroine's name from a line of Odes 4.1, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, as well as its motif of nostalgia for a former flame. Kipling wrote a famous parody of the Odes, satirising their stylistic idiosyncrasies and especially the extraordinary syntax, but he also used Horace's Roman patriotism as a focus for British imperialism, as in the story Regulus in the school collection Stalky & Co., which he based on Odes 3.5.[124] Wilfred Owen's famous poem, quoted above, incorporated Horatian text to question patriotism while ignoring the rules of Latin scansion. However there were few other echoes of Horace in the war period, possibly because war is not actually a major theme of Horace's work.[125] Bibendum (the symbol of the Michelin tyre company) takes his name from the opening line of Ode 1.37, Nunc est bibendum. Ode 1.37, Both W.H.Auden and Louis MacNeice began their careers as teachers of classics and both responded as poets to Horace's influence. Auden for example evoked the fragile world of the 1930s in terms echoing Odes 2.11.1–4, where Horace advises a friend not to let worries about frontier wars interfere with current pleasures. And, gentle, do not care to know Where Poland draws her Eastern bow, What violence is done; Nor ask what doubtful act allows Our freedom in this English house, Our picnics in the sun.[nb 34] The American poet, Robert Frost, echoed Horace's Satires in the conversational and sententious idiom of some of his longer poems, such as The Lesson for Today (1941), and also in his gentle advocacy of life on the farm, as in Hyla Brook (1916), evoking Horace's fons Bandusiae in Ode 3.13. Now at the start of the third millennium, poets are still absorbing and re-configuring the Horatian influence, sometimes in translation (such as a 2002 English/American edition of the Odes by thirty-six poets)[nb 35] and sometimes as inspiration for their own work (such as a 2003 collection of odes by a New Zealand poet).[nb 36] Horace's Epodes have largely been ignored in the modern era, excepting those with political associations of historical significance. The obscene qualities of some of the poems have repulsed even scholars[nb 37] yet more recently a better understanding of the nature of Iambic poetry has led to a re-evaluation of the whole collection.[126][127] A re-appraisal of the Epodes also appears in creative adaptations by recent poets (such as a 2004 collection of poems that relocates the ancient context to a 1950s industrial town).[nb 38] |
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