Search Results

This chapter assesses the end of Horace's Ars Poetica. In considering the poem's final lines, the chapter returns to its opening ones, showing how they are linked through a concern with the visual and with making and creating in numerous manifestations. It proposes that the Ars Poetica be read as an ars poiētikē, art of creating, for Horace's interests lie in the overlap of all human pursuits. The source of Latin poetica—and with it “poet,” “poem,” and “poetry”—the Greek verb poiein is rather more wide ranging in its senses, encompassing “make, produce, bring into existence, cause, and do,” that is, making and creating in a multitude of forms. In addition, in concluding the Ars Poetica by indulging himself in a flight of the sublime, Horace ends the poem's conversation on creative endeavor by revealing definitively his superior and unmatchable mastery of the literary art.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Horace's Ars Poetica, a 476-line poem revered for over fifteen hundred years as the indispensable guide for practicing poets. Ars Poetica provided a blueprint for efforts at “updated” rules of literary composition and it inspired numerous famous translators and imitators. Yet this poem has proven hard to love for recent readers. As its ostensible value as “a kind of literary 'Magna Carta'” receded and it ceased to be widely regarded as a document that could ever sincerely aid in literary composition, the Ars Poetica came to develop an entrenched reputation of being tedious and devoid of artistry. This duality is inevitably tied up with the understanding of it as modeled upon earlier Greek works, a relation that both granted the Ars Poetica a greater standing and yet doomed it to be seen as “an anthology of previous ideas, not a system of thought in which each idea has its place as a living and flexible member of an organically unified discourse.” This book then considers the Ars Poetica as a complete and exceptional literary achievement in its own right. It also elucidates the key place of the Ars Poetica in the Horatian corpus.

This epilogue traces the themes and concerns of the previous chapters throughout the Ars Poetica's considerable reception history. If the Ars Poetica's poetic qualities have not always been clear to scholars of literature, they seem to have been more evident to the practicing writers who, inspired by Horace's poem, wrote artes poeticae of their own. Indeed, practicing poets have long discerned what many literary scholars have not: that the poem's value lies not so much in its stated contents as in its fine-spun internal unity; in its interest in human nature and the onward march of time; in the importance of criticism—both giving and receiving it—to the artistic process; and in the essential sameness of writing, of making art, and of living, loving, being, and even dying. The argument made in this study for reading the Ars Poetica as a literary achievement in its own right may therefore be viewed as a return to the complex, nuanced ways in which it was already read in the Middle Ages, through the sixteenth century, and into the twenty-first. The authors of the later works examined in this chapter read the Ars Poetica as exemplifying and instantiating the sort of artistry that it opaquely commands, and they reflected this in turn through their own verses.

This chapter discusses the first word of the Ars Poetica, humano (human), which heralds the poem's concern with all that living entails. This casts the scope of the work far beyond poetry from the start. As the poem progresses, this is borne out by Horace's striking focus on human emotions, on life cycles (whether of people or words), on nature and human nature, and on spoken language, all of which are given far greater prominence than seems justified in the ostensible context of creating believable characters for the stage. Horace's concern is with all human endeavor—the ars vivendi (art of living). If the Ars Poetica is read for how it expresses itself, moreover, rather than merely for what it says, it emerges as an ideal exemplum of art, the whole proving seamless and lending itself to being remade in new ways by every reader and upon every reading.

This chapter examines the Pisones, the persons to whom the Ars Poetica is addressed. It argues that Horace subjects the Pisones to a far less gentle handling than has been generally acknowledged, and one in line with his aggressive treatment at times of addressees and other figures in his Satires and Epistles. In dedicating his poem to a unit consisting of a father and two sons, Horace is able to make the father–son relationship a central narrative strand of the Ars Poetica and, with it, the theme of teaching. Ultimately, the chapter sees Horace presenting a studied evolution of his poetic persona from student-son in the Satires, written at the beginning of his career, in which one witnesses him receiving teachings from his own father, to teacher-father in the Ars Poetica, written at his career's end. From behind his masks of senex and pater, Horace instructs and helps to shape the Piso boys (and the general reader), as his own father had done for the poet's youthful persona in Satires.

This chapter focuses on two key words: amici (friends) and risum (laughter). Both terms run the length of the Ars Poetica, appearing sometimes singly and at other times in unison, such that the senses of each crystallize further, both individually and together, with every appearance. Horace explores the paradox that the obligation of a true friend is to criticize, especially through laughter, even at the risk of causing pain, and that criticisms issued by a friend are necessarily true. Within the framework of Roman and, especially, Epicurean amicitia (friendship), Horace boldly negotiates for himself the position of “friend” vis-à-vis the Pisones, although these figures are mentioned nowhere else in his corpus. This ruse of friendship is nevertheless what allows Horace to criticize his addressees' literary talents and discourage them (along with perhaps every reader) from attempting to write poetry.

Persius plays off the Ars Poetica of Horace, his predecessor in satire, by changing Horace’s condemnation of the badly integrated poetic corpus into a literal description of bad poetry as mutilated bodies. Further metaphorical sleight of hand allows him to suggest that reading or reciting bad poetry (these mutilated bodies) is akin to a form of cannibalism, especially if one is “eating” the literary tradition only to “vomit it up” in a derivative form. Persius manipulates the central metaphor of digestion here to link medical injunctions against culinary missteps to the idea that listening to unhealthy forms of verse might be equally bad for one’s health. The meatiness and omophagia that are made to characterize certain poetic forms recall the meat-eating feasts of epic, a genre Persius abjures; likewise, the notion of the poet as a hungry belly is made to problematize all poetic efforts that seek profit the praise of an audience. The etymology of the word “satura” may have been “a plate of rich food,” but Persius goes against the grain in claiming that his own writing is precisely the opposite of such gastropoetic excess.

Horace's literary epistles, contrary to their own written medium, are fascinated with performance. It is not just that the Ars Poetica is a didactic poem on how to write tragedy and Epistles 2.1 focuses mostly on drama in its literary history. Horace is interested in the function of the poet in society. He claims a plenitude for choral lyric and for the archaic poet's role as a founder that is lacking for himself. Although he had already composed the Carmen saeculare by the time of the epistle, he does not line up his own epistolary oeuvre with such plenitude and rather presents the library as a place of refuge for a poet who does not want to be subject to the whims of an audience.

This chapter addresses Senecan poetics more broadly. The analysis of intertexts from Vergil’s Georgics and Horace’s Ars Poetica shows how Seneca bases his poetics on the reception of precepts from the Augustan poets. Latin poets practice what they preach, often incorporating metapoetic reflection in their work. Seneca is no different, and sections from the Agamemnon (Cassandra’s speeches) and Oedipus (necromancy) offer paradigmatic moments of “writing” and “reading” in Senecan tragedy.

This chapter discusses how the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, particularly in early sixteenth-century Italy, revived ancient concerns over Lucan’s generic status, and shows how the friction between the categories of ‘poetry’ and ‘history’ - however confusingly defined and understood - continued to affect English responses to the Bellum Ciuile until well into mid-seventeenth century England. Among other engagements it examines in detail the role of the poetry-history debate over Lucan in relation to Samuel Daniel’s complex and unfinished verse history The Civil Wars (ca. 1595 – 1609), Thomas Farnaby’s commentary on Lucan of 1618, and Thomas May’s responses to Lucan of the late 1620s.

This chapter’s new reading of Horace’s AP teases out how this text negotiates a delicate tension and balance between Horace’s own inferior social status and superior status as older expert, and the superior social status and inferior age/expertise of the young Pisones for whom he writes. It traces how the text renders productive the challenges that result from these asymmetries by modelling and performing a mode of critical thinking centred on self-critique and self-reflection. Taking into account the dimension of class difference enables a new understanding of the AP’s emphasis on coherence and its obsession with tragedy, by pointing to the challenges contained and represented in the political microcosm of the theatre where—just as in Horace’s pedagogical encounter with the Pisones—shifting power relations among an unwieldy mix of members from different classes, all jointly engaged in the performance of art and art criticism, need to be carefully negotiated.

This chapter examines the place of digression in Modernist debates surrounding the theory of aesthetics in relation to American political culture. Wallace Stevens adopts digression as a governing trope of the ars poetica in order to undo the politically “purposeful” genres of polemic and manifesto which dominate aesthetic theory in the Modernist period. In this poem, Stevens frames theoretical ratiocination within a digressive logic “in which there seems / To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or / Not apprehended well.” The question of evasion, raised within Stevens’ lifetime through the poet’s dispute with the Marxist critic Stanley Burnshaw, marks an encounter between aestheticism and the politics of purpose in American intellectual culture of the period. At once raising and deconstructing the idea of purpose, the digressive ars poetica serves as the stage upon which Stevens mobilizes Kant’s aesthetic theory to underwrite poetic form in the Modernist lyric.

Chapter 5 builds on the discussion of Dante in dialogue with the poets who preceded and overlapped with him to investigate the Florentine poet’s own efforts to perform a teleological, unitary, and converted subjectivity in the Commedia. The chapter explains and complicates the mechanics of Dante’s performance, using the dream of the femmina balba/siren as a focal point. This analysis draws on the models established through the discussions of Guittone, Guinizzelli, and Cavalcanti to reopen the closure of Dante’s performance of converted textuality and subjectivity. The chapter aims to open the way for the resiliently disruptive textuality of past works to sound alongside the self-consciously authorial voice of the poet of the Commedia.

This chapter explores the veil of poetic imagination formed within the Jewish esoteric tradition known as “kabbalah”. The semantic range of the term encompasses practice and theory, in Western philosophical jargon, or in rabbinic locution, ma'aseh and Talmud, a way of doing and a way of thinking. It also discusses Ars Poetica and how the “poetic function” of language (for traditional kabbalists) deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.

Richard Owen's entry into the Geological Society of London sparked an interest and excitement in him. His wife, Caroline, wrote in her journal about Owen's witnessing interest of leading geologists in the game of “high jinks” as immortalized in Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering. The significance of this game to these men of science shows a connection between the literary culture of the nineteenth-century men of science and how it influenced the creation of new knowledge. John Playfair, professor of natural history, rewrote James Hutton's Theory of the Earth—which was the dominating thought at the time. Playfair's conception of the earth shares common process and construction with the inner workings of a poem—as is shown in Horace's Ars Poetica. This fictionalizing aspect of literary form in scientific arrangements would prove critical in the Geological Society's rejection of cosmogony and cosmology, giving literature a place in the science of geology.

This chapter focuses on the three long literary epistles that are Horace’s last works, addressed, respectively, to Augustus, to Julius Florus, and to the members of the Piso family (which, following Quintilian, has come to be known, somewhat misleadingly, as the Ars Poetica). These verse letters are discussed with a view to showing that several of Horace’s general statements about poetry constitute an implicit commentary on his own lyric compositions, as regards the importance of craft, the value of the poet to Roman society, and the ability of the best poetry to be useful as well as pleasurable.