Epistles of Horace

After reading Alexander Pope's variations on Horace, I went to my bookshelf and pulled off a book that had been on it for a while: David Ferry's translations of Horace's Epistles. There's a reason people have been reading Horace for two thousand years: the poems are absolutely splendid. Knowing no Latin, I cannot judge the accuracy of the translations, but the English poems Ferry has produced are simply brilliant.

People are punished for whatever maddens their kings. (Book 1, Epistle 2)

I could quote dozens of lines and passage that struck me; some of which seemed uncannily timely, like that one. This is poetry that counsels, advises, amuses, mocks, entreats, entrances, and generally thrills its reader.

... The man who puts off
The time to start living right is like the hayseed
Who wants to cross the river and so he sits there
Waiting for the river to run out of water,
And the river flows by, and it flows on by, forever. (1:2)

Often, Horace exemplifies the poet as dispenser of wisdom in elegant and memorable forms:

Between hope and encouragement, fears, and angers, and such,
Treat every day as the last you're going to have,
Then welcome the next as unexpectedly granted. (1:4)

But the wisdom does not just take the form of counsel about how to live your life; it can also take on more amusing forms:

But look what drinking can do! It reveals what's hidden;
It tells you that you'll get what you always wanted;
It pushes the coward right out into the battle;
It lifts the anxious burden from troubled hearts;
It helps you do what you couldn't do before.
Who hasn't been made more eloquent by drink?
However confined in poverty, tell me, who hasn't
Been freed for a while from feeling that he's unfree? (1:5)

The Epistles share with other classical texts the fascinating feature of revealing things, whether inadvertently or intentionally, about the shared knowledge of all those who lived in that world, information that one might feel the need to provide footnotes for today, though in the following case, it really isn't necessary:

The man who doesn't know the difference between
Wool dyed with Sidonian purple or just with dyes
From Aquinum isn't as badly off as the man
Who isn't able to tell the true from the false. (1:10)

This one struck me particularly because a few days before I read the passage, Miles's second-grade homework included "Why was purple the color of kings in the ancient world?" as the "Question of the Week" that they do every week, so along with him, I had learned about Sidonian purple! But the text gives you all the information you need without a footnote or a quick Wikipedia check.

Of course, reading Horace also leads you to passages that seem somehow familiar, because you've heard the story before, or perhaps even read references to it before, without knowing (or registering) that the story came from this source:

The stag was a better fighter than the horse
And often drove him out of their common pasture,
Until the horse, the loser, asked man's help
And acquiesced in taking the bit in his mouth.
But after his famous victory in this battle
He couldn't get the rider off his back
And he couldn't get the bit out of his mouth. (1:10)

What a joy it must be to translate lines that are that good!

Horace does have a thing about wine, or perhaps I do, as I am the one who kept noting passages where he talks about it:

No point in even asking about the wine.
At home I'm used to putting up with whatever;
But when I go away I want to have
Something a whole lot nicer, smooth and mellow,
Infusing hopefulness into the heart and veins,
Good for banishing care and promoting a flow
Of eloquence to make some lady think
That I'm still young when it's perfectly clear I'm not. (1:15)

The playful tone here appears throughout the epistles and keeps their morality from becoming moralizing, as when, a few lines later, he comments on the idea of moderation:

I'm just like that. When there isn't a lot to be had,
I'm very good at praising moderation;
But when there's something better and richer offered,
Why then I'm very good at praising how
You rich men live it up in your splendid houses. (1:15)

Or as he puts it two epistles later:

But if you want to be a little kinder
Both to yourself and your friends, be willing to go
To dinner once in a while at a rich man's house. (1:17)

That's assuming you can get an invitation, of course. And if you do, then the wine you drink will put you in good company, that of the Muses:

... Ever since Bacchus
Enrolled us poets among his fauns and satyrs,
There's been a hint of the memory of wine
On the morning breath of the Muses. (1:19)

And, as this implies, Horace naturally spends a lot of time talking about poetry:

If poetry, like wine, improves with age,
Then tell me, I'd like to know, how do you know
Exactly in what year a particular poem
Turns into a good one? (2:1)

Horace wrote this in an epistle to Augustus; has anyone written criticism in poetic form for any American President or British PM? :-)

Even the spread of poetry beyond the professionals to just about anyone gets a detailed comment:

But times and tastes have changed. Now everyone
Is seized with the desire to write a poem;
Grave elders and their offspring crowned with wreaths
Dictate their verses to one another at dinner;
And as for me, I'm lying in my teeth
When I solemnly swear I've sworn off scribbling lines.
No sooner do I wake up than I call for a pen
And paper, and off I go. A man who knows nothing
About how to sail a ship won't do it; he's scared to.
Doctors do doctor's work. Carpenters handle
The tools it takes a carpenter's skills to use.
But skilled or unskilled we all feel free to write poems. (2:1)

Before you think that Horace sounds like a critic of creative-writing courses, you have to read what follows:

And yet in the end there's something to be said
For this craze. It's relatively harmless,
And, more than that, it even has its virtues. (2:1)

The last epistle (2:3) is the Ars Poetica, and it has far too many wonderful bits in it to quote them all. This one reminded me of Yeats:

My aim is to take familiar things and make
Poetry of them, and do it in such a way
That it looks as if it was as easy as could be
For anybody to do it (although he'd sweat
And strain and work his head off, all in vain). (2:3)

At the same time, though, Horace contradicts the bit of Yeats that that passage reminded me of ("Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught"):

Withhold your favor from any poem that doesn't
Show signs of the time spent upon it ... (2:3)

And there are familiar bits here, too, of course, that you might vaguely remember came from some Roman or Greek:

Poetry wants to instruct or else to delight;
Or, better still, to delight and instruct at once. (2:3)

Pope referred to Homer's nodding, and I thought, "Oh, that comes from Pope!" But it doesn't, it comes from Horace:

... It's true that it bothers me
When Homer nods, but, after all, it's true
That writers of such long works must drowse sometimes. (2:3)

And, of course, I don't always agree with Horace:

... A poem's
Created to yield delight to the heart and mind.
If it falls a little short of doing that,
It falls right down to the bottom, all the way down. (2:3)

This comes quite close to the idea that any poem that is not a good poem is not a poem after all, a conception of poetry (or of art in general) that seems utterly unproductive to me. One has to be able to say that a particular work of art is bad; it is unnecessary to banish the bad art from the realm of art entirely.

Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated

I was struck by the three lines from Pope's "Essay on Criticism" that have become proverbial, and one thing I noted in "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," the first of his "Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated," was the appearance of the phrase "Damn with faint praise"; later, a line appears that reminded me of a web site I have occasionally followed links to: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" (The web site is called "Butterflies and Wheels.")

Describing his childhood, Pope produces this couplet, in which "numbers" means "metrical verses":

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

So verses began coming to him even as a child, and never stopped doing so. But at least they stop while he sleeps, as he points out that he "can sleep without a poem in my head." I like that puzzling image, not because I agree with it, but because sometimes I wish I could "sleep without a song in my head," when a song heard during the day haunts my dreams all night, and even the dreamless periods seem to follow the same chords.

Still, in the "First Satire of the Second Book of Horace," a dialogue between P and F (Pope and Fortescue, to whom the poem is dedicated, Pope responds to F's suggestion that he ought to stop writing:

... Not write? But then I think,
And for my soul I cannot sleep a wink.

All poets know that feeling: if you don't get up and write something down, you're not going back to sleep. And sometimes, to paraphrase David Mamet, only writing can stop the thinking, all that terrible noise in there.

*

I won't write a separate post on The Dunciad, which I found rather slow going, but I did find a few things worth noting, first and foremost "The Cave of Poverty and Poetry," to which all poets always fear being banished. I was also amused to find the line "something betwixt a Heidegger and an owl," which I would anachronistically read as a reference to a German philosopher and to Athena, but it turns out that this Heidegger was a famously ugly man who was "master of revels" for George II.

To Richard Boyle

When I was reading Alexander Pope a few weeks ago (see my previous posts here and here), I was struck by a point made twice in his poem "To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington" (Boyle was an architect):

You show us, Rome was glorious, not profuse,
And pompous buildings once were things of use.

Or, as Pope puts it later:

'Tis use alone that sanctifies expense,
And splendor borrows all her rays from sense.

I was reminded of Goethe's remarks in Spoleto, at the end of the same century, with the same emphasis on the utility of Roman architecture, in contrast to the alleged uselessness of the architecture of Pope and Goethe's respective contemporaries.

Essay on Man

My edition of Pope begins with "An Essay on Criticism," then things got kind of slow for me for a while; even "The Rape of the Lock" (the title poem of the edition) did not really thrill me. "Windsor Forest" is a charming poem that reminded me of Ausonius's fourth-century poem to the Mosel (the earliest piece of literature known to have been written in what is now Germany), but of course Ausonius himself was working in a long-existing genre, celebrating a particular place in verse. Pope's "Eloïsa to Abelard" did not add much to my understanding of those celebrated lovers, but I was surprised to discover the line "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind." I've never seen the movie, but it does make me wonder whether it contains a Pope reference or not!

"An Essay on Man," though is a fabulous work. I've always had the lines about "Know then thyself" in my head, without ever having read the poem itself, and I was pleased to discover lots of quotable passages:

Why has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.

Behold the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier play-thing gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer books are the toys of age:
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;
Till tired he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er.

One passage reminded me of Nietzsche's essay on the use and abuse of history:

To each unthinking being, Heaven is a friend,
Gives not the useless knowledge of its end

Pope rejects (as I do) Hobbes's idea of a violent "state of nature" ("her" here refers to "Nature"):

Self-love and Social at her birth began.

I have different reasons for assuming that early humans were social beings, and not isolated enemies à la Hobbes: the gregariousness of the other great apes. Yes, chimps can be pretty violent, but mostly outside their own social group.

It's amusing to come across an idea promulgated by contemporary supporters of free trade:

What War could ravish, Commerce could bestow,
And he returned a friend, who came a foe.

How does the line go? Something about how no two countries that both have McDonalds franchises have ever fought a war against each other. :-)

My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Howard (I think it's her birthday today; she's ... 93, I think. I better call her!), so I was amused by this couplet:

What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards?
Alas! Not all the blood of all the Howards!

And for those of us who have ever felt the itch to be famous (which is all of us, isn't it?), Pope has an antidote:

What's Fame? a fancied life in others' breath,
A thing beyond us, even before our death.

"A fancied life in others' breath" so beautifully captures one of the main features of fame!

Now, let's see if I really know the "Know then thyself" couplet:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.

I did not get the capitalization of "Man" right, but otherwise, I have always been quoting it correctly. The memorability of the heroic couplet—one reason, apparently, that Pope chose to write even his "essays" in his favorite (only?) poetic form.

Essay on Criticism

I took Alexander Pope off the shelf off a few days ago, an edition of The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems that I picked up in the U.S. last summer. The first poem in the book is "Essay on Criticism," which surprised me, first of all, by being the source of three proverbial statements:

A little learning is a dangerous thing.

To err is human, to forgive divine.

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

But the poem is, of course, much more than its quotable quotes. I was equally struck by Pope's sense of the interplay between rules and the breaking of rules:

If, where the rules not far enough extend,
(Since rules were made but to promote their end)
Some lucky licence answer to the full
The intent proposed, that licence is a rule.

By breaking the rules, then, one may "snatch a grace beyond the reach of art."


As a poet playing the critic of critics, Pope tends to defend the poets, where they deserve defense, in his eyes. The errors one may detect may well turn out to be one's own (in what I have since discovered is an allusion to Horace):

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

Or, as I would put it, once a writer or artist has proven to be brilliantly successful in some significant number of works, one should assume that what looks like "nodding" was intentional. I'm not sure I would go as far as Pope to suggest that the problem is then always in the reader, but I am well aware of the role of my own "dreaming" in my response to works. But then, if I dream, perhaps it is not that I am not paying attention, but that the author is not holding my attention.


But perhaps Pope's point, in his reference to Homer, is one he reiterates later, one I wholeheartedly agree with:

A perfect judge will read each work of wit
With the same spirit that its author writ

All too often, critics condemn works for not living up to conventions or standards that the author of the work was simply not interested in. The work should be responded to on its own terms, and not on terms imposed by the critic.


Its didactic side is perhaps the most significant feature, then, of Pope's "Essay on Criticism": Pope wants to tell you how to be a critic. Some of the advice is worth sending to various contemporary critics, for example:

And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence
...
Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.

There is a lot to be said for the confidence of the strong critic, but Pope's points here (and in the whole passage starting in line 560) make clear that an arrogant approach and a self-styled bluntness end up saying less about the work in question than about the critic. For example, I do enjoy William Logan's critical skewerings, but not as commentaries on the poets and collections he addresses. Rather, they are simply performances in their own right—and they lack something truly good reviewing always has: the communication to each reader of the simple sense of whether he or she will like the work, independent of whether the reviewer likes the work. (In fact, it's only as I was thinking about this that I realized that that is lacking in Logan's criticism—I may know that he dislikes a particular collection, but after reading his criticism, I have no sense of whether I will like it or not.)