They are the poems of a single moment, intensely realized. But Horace's Odes are more like the lyrics of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas. The British scholar A.Y. Campbell tells a good story about this. He went through a copy of the Odes which had belonged to Walter Savage Landor, himself a fine lyric poet; and he was astonished to find that Landor had repeatedly struck out the concluding stanzas of Horace's poems, writing in the margin "What trash" or "Stuff" or "Better without." This puzzled Campbell. But in time he realized that it was the natural reaction of a simple and direct poet criticising a complex and indirect poet.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, May 31, 2025
What Trash
Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), Poets in a Landscape (1957; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2010), pp. 128-129: