Letters from a Poet - Sample

Classical Philology, 2021

Seneca Philosophus, Jula Wildberger, Marcia J. Colish (Eds.) Berlin De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2014, 167-188

Horace and Seneca. Interactions, Intertexts, Interpretations, 2017

The modern perception of Horace is of a lyric poet of evanescent pleasure, of 'wine, women, and song,' and of a distinctively dispassionate and sometimes ironic tone. ¹ Although there are occasional traces of this Horace in early modern English poetry, Horatian imitation in this period is dominated by a quite different version of the Roman poeta perception of Horace as above all a great moralist, both in lyric and hexameter poetry, and a moralist rooted strongly in the everyday realities of courtly life, the demands of patronage, and the pleasures and compromises of panegyric. ² Richard Tottel's popular Songes and Sonnettes (often referred to as 'Tottel's miscellany') of 1557, for instance, includes no fewer than three versions of Carm. 2.10, titled not with reference to Horace, but in terms of their moralising force: 'Praise of mean and constant estate' (no. 32), 'Of the golden mean' (no. 253), and 'The mean estate is to be accounted the best' (no. 163). ³ The volume includes a fourth poem with an almost identical title-'Of the meane and sure estate' (no. 128)although this is not in fact a version of Carm. 2.10 but rather Thomas Wyatt's rendering of the final part of the second chorus from Seneca's Thyestes, 391-403: Stond who so list upon the slipper wheele, Of hye astate and let me here rejoyce. And use my life in quietnesse eche dele, Unknowen in court that hath the wanton toyes, In hidden place my time shal slowly passe And when my yeres be past withouten noyce  See for example Harrison 2007c.  Burrow 1993; Moul 2010, especially 9-12. The Epistles and Odes Book 2, with its moral and philosophical themes, and Book 4, with an emphasis upon panegyric, are accordingly particularly popular in early modern translations and imitations; whereas modern criticism has tended to find those collections less rewarding than Books 1 and 3.  Each of these poems is presented anonymously, although the first (no. 32) is known to be by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. For a fuller discussion of these poems, see Moul 2016. Tottel's work was revised and reprinted eight times between 1557 and 1587, and was the first in a series of popular verse anthologies of this kind. Other poets translated or imitated in the collection (though without explicit acknowledgement)