The New Criterion

“Now and again, an anthology is published which is also a real book. That is, the editor’s selection shows us new ways of reading poetry,” said Thom Gunn about The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse (1991) edited by Emrys Jones. One of Jones’s best ideas was the copious inclusion of translations, for the Elizabethan age was when English verse learned to incorporate old and new classics. There were Wyatt’s Horace, Surrey’s Virgil, Marlowe’s Lucan, Harrington’s Ariosto, Chapman’s Homer, Fairfax’s Tasso. The ancient author most congenial to that time was Ovid, who tempted Marlowe to do the Amores, Drayton to do the Heroical Epistles (adapted to English history), and Golding to do the Metamorphoses.

Now comes the splendid Horace in English, first of a new Penguin series that is to include Virgil, Homer, and Martial in English. The Horace volume is edited by D. S. Carne-Ross and Kenneth Haynes and introduced by Carne-Ross, who, as he showed in his Pindar (1985), weds easily borne learning to a contemporary poetic sensibility.

Carne-Ross is a modernist, a Poundian, who sees indeed in Pound’s reshaping of the English line (not least in Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius”) a key achievement of modern poetry. Small wonder that Propertius’s and Pindar’s clashing tonalities and logical leaps speak to Carne-Ross. But Horace? Gentle, sage, quotidian, maxim-dispensing, emperor-flattering, wine-bibbing, tart-cuddling, farm-loving Horace? The poet we hated in school? The very voice of wry middle age? The anti-Catullus?

Well, Carne-Ross, wearing his modernism with a difference, loves in Horace the lilt of a heart-stopping phrase and proves that many a fine English poet has, too. Of course, there are two Horaces: the composer of the trickily musical odes and the writer of the more discursive satires and epistles. The one who came triumphantly into English was the latter, and even he had to wait until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This book is arranged chronologically within genres—odes, epodes, satires, epistles—and the reader might turn first to the satires and epistles as done by Cowley (1668), Rochester (1680), Oldham (1681), and, supremely, Pope. Pope’s transfusions of English blood into Roman Horace are some of the happiest things in literary history. What Pope does is not translation but Englishing in the full sense: for content, he finds English equivalents in the society and letters and politics of England for the things Horace was writing about Rome; for form, he has his Mozartian command of the English heroic couplet. To illustrate the dynamics of this Augustan “imitation,” Carne-Ross prints a literal modern version en face with Pope’s version of Epistle 2.1 on Roman literature. At one point in the modern version, the debased Roman theater audience “demand[s] in mid-play a bear or boxers (that’s what thrills the mob).” Here’s Pope:

There still remains to mortify a Wit,
The many-headed Monster of the Pit:
A sense-less, worth-less, and unhonour’d
           crowd;
Who to disturb their betters mighty proud,
Clatt’ring their sticks, before ten lines
          are spoke,
Call for the Farce, the Bear, or the Black-joke.
What dear delight to Britons Farce affords!
Farce once the taste of Mobs, but now
           of Lords.

Pope’s couplets make Horace live because they exactly express a polite civilization comparable to Horace’s; the academic’s limp rendering (and note how he steals Pope’s mob for Horace’s plebecula) merely points to life elsewhere.

There’s been no Pope for the refractory Odes. In their intricately tesselated patterning and their fugitive attitudes (and lately, it must be said, in their occasional but inevitable patriotism—the word “fascist” has been hurled by modish Latinists), they’ve largely resisted Englishing. What little of excellence exists in English is here: Ben Jonson and Pope on love at age fifty; Dryden’s extraordinary “Pindarique Paraphrase” of 3.29; Thomas Tickell’s adaptation of the Paris ode to the Jacobite rebellion; John Quincy Adams’s (yes, the same one) delightful version of “Integer vitae.” And, true to his modernist attachments, Carne-Ross makes a case for some gnarled, thickly twisted metrically adventurous versions: three fascinating late tries by Ezra Pound, one by Basil Bunting, and a proleptically modernist stab at the Pyrrha ode by John Milton. For the rest, the editors dutifully print as many decent Englishings over the centuries of as many odes as possible. Carne-Ross thinks highly, too highly, of recent versions by C. H. Sisson and David Ferry—but they are clear and simple, I grant.

There’s a concluding “selection of poems that would not have been written but for Horace”: we get Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” on Cromwell, a poem Carne-Ross calls “more searching … than the only work of Horace to which it can by directly compared, the Cleopatra Ode”—itself a great poem that has, apparently, never been interestingly translated; Carew on spring (this a real discovery); Pope on women; Kipling’s three delightful Horatian parodies; and Frost’s “A Lesson for Today.” Actually, an awful lot of Frost is Horatian, and a lyric selection might have been fresher. Say “Reluctance,” which concludes:

Ah, when to the heart of man

    Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,

    To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end

    Of a love or a season?

Reluctantly Horatian, too, in his love of retrospective sadness, was, as Carne-Ross shrewdly notes, the programatically anticlassical Philip Larkin.

This is a wonderful anthology, life-giving and thought-provoking—a real book.