“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?
Pope’s transfusions of
