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Horace's Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living

Online ISBN:
9780691197432
Print ISBN:
9780691195025
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Book

Horace's Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living

Jennifer Ferriss-Hill
Jennifer Ferriss-Hill
University of Miami
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Published online:
21 May 2020
Published in print:
12 November 2019
Online ISBN:
9780691197432
Print ISBN:
9780691195025
Publisher:
Princeton University Press

Abstract

For two millennia, the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), the 476-line literary treatise in verse with which Horace closed his career, has served as a paradigmatic manual for writers. Rarely has it been considered as a poem in its own right, or else it has been disparaged as a great poet's baffling outlier. Here, this book fully reintegrates the Ars Poetica into Horace's oeuvre, reading the poem as a coherent, complete, and exceptional literary artifact intimately linked with the larger themes pervading his work. Arguing that the poem can be interpreted as a manual on how to live masquerading as a handbook on poetry, the book traces its key themes to show that they extend beyond poetry to encompass friendship, laughter, intergenerational relationships, and human endeavor. If the poem is read for how it expresses itself, moreover, it emerges as an exemplum of art in which judicious repetitions of words and ideas join disparate parts into a seamless whole that nevertheless lends itself to being remade upon every reading. This book is a logical evolution of Horace's work, which promises to inspire a long overdue reconsideration of a hugely influential yet misunderstood poem.

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