Horace's Narrative Odes

Download or read book Horace's Narrative Odes written by Michèle Lowrie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative has not traditionally been a subject in the analysis of lyric poetry. This book deconstructs the polarity that divides and binds lyric and narrative means of representation in Horace's Odes. While myth is a canonical feature of Pindaric epinician, Horace cannot adopt the Pindaricmode for aesthetic and political reasons. Roman Callimacheanism's privileging of the small and elegant offers a pretext for Horace to shrink from the difficulty of writing praise poetry in the wake of civil war. But Horace by no means excludes story-telling from his enacted lyric. On the formallevel, numerous odes contain narration. Together they constitute a larger narrative told over the course of Horace's two lyric collections. Horace tells the story of his development as a lyricist and of the competing aesthetic and political demands on his lyric poetry. At issue is whether he canever truly become a poet of praise.