Titlebook: Horace and Housman; Richard Gaskin Book 2013 Richard Gaskin 2013 literary criticism.lyric.Ovid.poem.British and Irish Literature

browbeat

,Housman’s Criticism of Horace,ned in the last chapter led to unsatisfactory results in his scholarship; naturally we shall concentrate here on Housnian’s textual criticism of Horace. I start with the passage from “Divis orte bonis” (. IV, 5) in which Horace describes peaceful life under the . (lines 17–24):

Minikin

Epithelium

nauseate

,Horace’s Attitude to Religion,any consolation from the expectation that, having led a distinguished life as a successful lawyer, he will be treated leniently when he comes before the “stern assize” of Hades. Another potentially puzzling feature of the ode is the way it handles the underworld. Is there an inconsistency between th

asthma

Religion and Politics in Housman,on remarks, “seems to be utilizing for merely rhetorical purposes a system of religion that he had abandoned long before he wrote them” (p. 141). This is so, for example, in the hymn that he wrote for his own funeral, which I quoted in the last chapter.. Sometimes, though there is no direct assault,

错事

epicardium

Questions of Integrity and Consistency,en poet and . Even if one disqualified Suetonius as being an unreliable witness, the . themselves would still provide good evidence that Horace’s praise was sincere. The fourth book is of course a special case, and our assessment of that work is complicated by the need to assess Suetonius’s assertio

harmony

Form and Content,tension with at least part of their respective contents (ii, p. 93 with n. 6). But the view that form and content may clash, though widespread, seems to me wrong. Note here that by “form” is meant, quite narrowly, the syntactic and metrical properties of the relevant verse; we are not here talking a

善辩

Housman, Literary Criticism, and the Classics,ce an intellectual one; hence, contrary to what Housman seems to suggest in the lecture, there can be no physical or physiological criterion for good poetry. Archibald MacLeish’s endlessly cited dictum that “a poem should not mean but be” (p. 41) is one of the stupidest things ever said about poetry

Cardiac

Pessimism and Pejorism,sbet and Hubbard ([1], p. 303). In chapter one, I quoted the first stanza of “On Wenlock Edge” and noted that in it Housnian drew the image of the troubled wood in part from Horace’s Soracte ode (I, 9). The first three stanzas of that ode read as follows: