Laudator Temporis Acti

Harry Eyres, Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), p. 8:

Horace is the canniest of classics, able to survive in fragmentary form. He invented some of the pithiest phrases ever coined. Horace’s phrases, lines, and poems have lasted, I reckon, because they’re the opposite of prefabricated or glib. His words are put together with a carpentry or stonemasonry so cunning and precise that nothing can prize them apart. Syllables, sounds, rhythms are locked together with a force that even earthquakes could not budge.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols X.1 (tr. Duncan Large):

To this day I have never had the same artistic delight in any poet as I was given from the start by one of Horace's odes. In certain languages what is achieved here cannot even be desired. This mosaic of words, in which every word radiates its strength as sound, as place, as concept, to the right and to the left and over the whole, this minimum in the range and number of its signs, the maximum which this attains in the energy of the signs—all this is Roman and, if I am to be believed, noble par excellence. All the rest of poetry becomes, in comparison, something too popular—a mere emotional garrulousness ...

Bis heute habe ich an keinem Dichter dasselbe artistische Entzücken gehabt, das mir von Anfang an eine Horazische Ode gab. In gewissen Sprachen ist Das, was hier erreicht ist, nicht einmal zu wollen. Dies Mosaik von Worten, wo jedes Wort als Klang, als Ort, als Begriff, nach rechts und links und über das Ganze hin seine Kraft ausströmt, dies minimum in Umfang und Zahl der Zeichen, dies damit erzielte maximum in der Energie der Zeichen—das Alles ist römisch und, wenn man mir glauben will, vornehm par excellence. Der ganze Rest von Poesie wird dagegen etwas zu Populäres,—eine blosse Gefühls-Geschwätzigkeit ...