Blog meditation

Seeing that no one has yet replied, I decided that I would get the ball rolling, so to speak. So, I would like to suggest that Horace, rather than distinguishing with great precision between the various putative types of “lyric” poem, portrays himself as a lyricist chiefly in contradistinction to epic poetry and with a view to his own national origin. In particular, he wishes to claim the prestige—and the style, as well—of the ancient Greek lyricists, chief among the Alcaeus and Sappho, while also asserting his role as a specifically and uniquely Roman poet. Although I cannot say for certain that his self-presentation is entirely consistent, much less uniform, it does seem to crop up in a similar fashion at various points in the work.

So, for example, at 1.11.32ff. Horace calls upon the Muses to give him the flute and the barbiton, explicitly identified as “Lesbian.” However, he also speaks of being “inserted among the lyric bards”; as we discussed in class, the term vates is quite specifically Roman. Thus Horace seems at once to be claiming—I do not prefer the “distancing” interpretation, though others might—the prestige of Alcaeus and Sappho for himself and the authority of the Roman prophet-poet. Moreover, he seems to be implying that the lyrici who preceded him were vates in their own right: that is, that Alcaeus, Sappho, and their ilk possessed the sort of authority that the Augustan poets affected to claim for themselves. Thus, he not only aims at a place among the Archaic lyricists or among the Roman vates, but attributes to the lyricists all the prestige that belongs to a vates.

Furthermore, in 1.32, Horace tells his lyre, again a barbiton, to sing a Latinum…carmen; what he ends up singing, however, is indeed in Latin, but about the glories of Alcaeus, ending with an address, a prayer almost, depending on the reading, to the lyre. The themes that he attributes to Alcaeus, drink and song and love, with the implication, maybe, that he sang also about war and sailing, are all major themes of his own work. Again, he seems to be claiming Alcaeus as a precedent for himself yet, at the same time, by highlighting the fact that he is writing (or singing, as he would have it) in Latin—a fact doubly stressed by the placement of barbite between Latinum and carmen, and by the glaring lack of purely Latin themes in the poem—asserting the novelty of his poetry. This theme, that Horace stands in a lyric tradition that goes back to the Greeks, but which he is now making Roman, is stressed most strongly, perhaps, at 3.30.12-14, where Horace calls himself ex humili potens / princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos / deduxisse modos.

Despite all this, much of which is perhaps rather obvious, Horace does not seem (to me at least) to show great explicit concern over which “lyric” genre he is following. He does reject epic (at 1.7, for example) and the like, though he flirts with it now and again, especially in the Roman odes; he also makes specific references to the styles of this or that poet, most notably Alcaeus and Sappho, but also Simonides at the end of 2.1, where he rejects the “Ceian dirge,” and perhaps Archilochus in 2.7. Furthermore, in 2.13, he contrasts the themes of Sappho (laments about girls) with those of Alcaeus (the hardships of sailing, exile, and war), all of which he himself takes up, save perhaps that of exile (though he does definitely speak of journeying and hints that his friend Pompeis might have been exiled).

His anxiety over the bounds of genre seems to be rather limited—he shows no qualms, for example, about writing both serious (or only semi-serious?) cletic hymns (as 1.30) and an out-and-out parody of a cletic hymn (3.21). He does, however, recognize (most notably in 2.1 and 3.3) that certain themes are not appropriate to his style. Nevertheless, he chooses to notice this only after he has already written about them; the very fact that he so pointedly chooses to break off where he does can only emphasize yet more strongly that he has, in fact, written about “grand” themes, despite his self-proclaimed fickleness.

Anyway, I just thought I would make a few observations; I claim no particular depth of insight. Feel free to disagree with me or to take the discussion in an entirely different direction.

1. Would Horace call lyric a genre? Horace is not writing tragedy, epic, or satire. He is not writing elegy, although Roman elegy was by the publication of the Odes a fairly well-defined lyric genre drawing from both Hellenistic and Archaic Greek traditions. His meters are lyric, either attested in Greek lyric poets or of his own synthesis from lyric meters; the closest thing to another metrical genre being his use of dactylic hexameter alternating with dactylic tetrameter. He knows what types of poems these meters are for: love poems, complaints about politics, advice, hymns, things in the first person, choral odes, encomia, propemptika. Perhaps the better word is a lyric tradition, rather than lyric genre. That tradition has certain meters, certain authors writing within it, certain topics, certain genres within it, and Horace makes use of all these things, renewing, parodying and playing with them. That tradition is also explicitly Greek, and as Matthias says, Horace casts himself as a pioneer, bringing it to Roman audiences and themes.

2. Horace knows the difference between a propemptikon and a kletic hymn and a public choral ode. He knows the rules of each, and often begins his poems adhering to those rules quite conventionally. 1.3 opens by addressing appropriate sea gods, Virgil's boat and Virgil, before praying for Virgil's safety- nothing dodgy until we lapse into that fall-of-humankind sequence. Similarly, 1.30 begins as an obvious Kletic hymn- only in the poem's last line is the reversal. Therefore, Horace knows enough about these genres to create the expectation of adhering to those genres in the reader, before he quite intentionally defeats those expectations. Similarly, he seems to have some notion of what material is considered "public" and what material is considered "less public"- Imagine writing a Christmas carol that midway through turns into a protest song about health care reform. You'd know what you were doing, and that somewhere along the line you hadn't written a proper Christmas song. However Menander Rhetor's myriad subgenres are absurd. Its as if any innovation or departure from the Platonic-ideal-propemptikon became a new Platonic ideal.

3. The above does not mean that Horace fully understood the nature of public vs. private verse, or monodic vs. choral poetry in Greece. Rather, the genres/ types of poems that we have been able to identify more clearly, like kletic hymns, or sphragides, Horace also accepted.

Looking over the first 3 books, it isn't obvious to me that Horace is signaling the content of his poems by means of any metric scheme or rhetorical devices. He uses his huge arsenal of techniques to render an often-repeated set of themes: nature, love, fate, stoic values, friendship, carpe diem... into verse. My impression is that Horace is showing us that he can handle any given topic in a number of different ways, keeping mainly to the lyric form. I think he uses this form both because of its pedigree, as well as for the freedom it affords him. He can deal with light and serious matters without the perhaps ponderous overtones of using an epic style.

First, I would like to declare that I have defeated the internet and managed to log into the blog. This is an accomplishment. (Thanks, Mattias)

Secondly, I would say that it is clear that Horace recognizes that there ARE differences in lyric and specifically in the lyric forms he is using. He claims to be pioneering a new form, thus indicating that he is branching off from the status quo (whatever that may be). If he thinks he is doing something new, he must be aware of what the 'old things' are. His poetry seems redolent with self-referential themes at some times (using Sapphics to talk about Sappho or Sapphic themes and Alcaics when referencing the poetry of Alcaeus, etc.), but at other times strikes me as breaking out as a new genre or defying the norms of the genre.
I think this is completely and utterly intentional. In order for Horace to flout the 'rules' of genre, he must show that he can follow them impeccably. The poetry of the first three books then reads to me as shouting out the praises of Horace's versatility moreso than a praise of his own skill.

Thirdly, it strikes me that Horace portrays himself as a lesser partner in his own work. The numerous references to Maecenas, Bacchus and to various Muses portray Horace as a passive recipient of inspiration rather than as an active poet. I do not know whether we would prefer to see this as self-effacing modesty, actual belief in an inspiring entity, or a convention merely brought out to display how well Horace can play by the rules.

Fourthly, it strikes me that the choice of meter is an important facet of Horace's work. I don't pretend to know precisely what he means when he chooses to write in Sappic meter instead of in Alcaics, but I think that Horace is intending something. Looking at the first at last poems alone show us that Horace is aware of communicating messages with his poetry that have nothing (overtly) to do with the words of the poems themselves. I think we could also find numerological games hidden within the poetry, for example, it strikes me that Book 1 has 38 poems and a Sapphic stanza has 38 syllables. I'm sure we could find other such parallels if we took the time to look for them.

Lastly, I think Horace has an idea of genre, but perhaps more of an intuitive idea of genre than a formalized one. He knows when he's breaking off from tradition, when he does something unusual, when he puts something into a weird meter to prove he can. What he doesn't do is formalize this knowledge into categories or necessarily see these categories as different and exclusive of each other. The constraints of the poetry give him more freedom by virtue of him breaking out of the constraints than if he had chosen to write in some less constrained form.

I'm not so inclined to box the Odes (or Horace in general) in to any particular genre. I think one of Horace's most famous predecessors in Latin poetry would actually be Catullus, who noticeably refuses to be confined to a genre. To be sure, Catullus is lighter on the 'public' side of poetry; the vast majority of his poems are intensely personal, either addressed to close friends, (ex-)lovers, personal critics, or himself, and carry few messages addressed to the population at large (a few of the hymns, perhaps, might be seen in as more in the public sphere: 34, the 60s, etc.). Still, Catullus seems to place great value in his flexibility, moving as he does from love elegy to epyllion to satire to hymns and constantly trying new meters as he does it. I see in the Odes that same importance placed on versatility; I think that Horace throwing out these ridiculously obscure meters for the specific purpose of flaunting his ability to move between them, and to refuse to be constrained to any one in particular. He addresses not only the public and the private but the silly and the serious, the self-promoting and the self-deprecating, the instructive and the irresponsible, and a host of other realms. I'm with Cynthia: Horace knows that he is not working in any well-defined genre and he takes advantage of that fact to range as far as possible.

As far as his self-representation goes, I think that his status as a vates is well-established in his own poems: witness his references to himself as a vates, his descriptions of his own miraculous preservation at the hands of Mercury or his favor with various Muses, and his declarations of his own immortality. However, I'm not certain that the poet getting drunk under the tree in 1.1 is the same poet who instructs the choir of boys and girls in a hymn to Diana in 1.21. I would say that his self-representation as a lover--i.e., as an older man who mostly looks on the passions of love with amused detachment and does not often these days fall in love himself--is quite consistent, and if we construe his status as a lover as integral to his role as a poet, perhaps that would be a point where we could pin down his poetic identity. We've seen times where Horace ventures toward epic style, though he always shies away from it and cuts the poem off, in accordance with his various abnegationes that he cannot be the epic poet everyone seeks to engage; on that point his self-construction as a non-epic poet seems consistent to the extent that his epicising teases will allow.

I'm not so inclined to box the Odes (or Horace in general) in to any particular genre. I think one of Horace's most famous predecessors in Latin poetry would actually be Catullus, who noticeably refuses to be confined to a genre. To be sure, Catullus is lighter on the 'public' side of poetry; the vast majority of his poems are intensely personal, either addressed to close friends, (ex-)lovers, personal critics, or himself, and carry few messages addressed to the population at large (a few of the hymns, perhaps, might be seen in as more in the public sphere: 34, the 60s, etc.). Still, Catullus seems to place great value in his flexibility, moving as he does from love elegy to epyllion to satire to hymns and constantly trying new meters as he does it. I see in the Odes that same importance placed on versatility; I think that Horace throwing out these ridiculously obscure meters for the specific purpose of flaunting his ability to move between them, and to refuse to be constrained to any one in particular. He addresses not only the public and the private but the silly and the serious, the self-promoting and the self-deprecating, the instructive and the irresponsible, and a host of other realms. I'm with Cynthia: Horace knows that he is not working in any well-defined genre and he takes advantage of that fact to range as far as possible.

As far as his self-representation goes, I think that his status as a vates is well-established in his own poems: witness his references to himself as a vates, his descriptions of his own miraculous preservation at the hands of Mercury or his favor with various Muses, and his declarations of his own immortality. However, I'm not certain that the poet getting drunk under the tree in 1.1 is the same poet who instructs the choir of boys and girls in a hymn to Diana in 1.21. I would say that his self-representation as a lover--i.e., as an older man who mostly looks on the passions of love with amused detachment and does not often these days fall in love himself--is quite consistent, and if we construe his status as a lover as integral to his role as a poet, perhaps that would be a point where we could pin down his poetic identity. We've seen times where Horace ventures toward epic style, though he always shies away from it and cuts the poem off, in accordance with his various abnegationes that he cannot be the epic poet everyone seeks to engage; on that point his self-construction as a non-epic poet seems consistent to the extent that his epicising teases will allow.