Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ezra Pound

Critical Essay by Ezra Pound

SOURCE: “Horace,” The Criterion, Vol. 9, No. XXXV, January, 1930, pp. 217-27.

In the following essay, Pound profiles Horace, finding much to assault, but crediting him as “the most skilful metrist among the Latins,” and explaining, with examples, why most attempts to translate Horace fail.

Neither simple nor passionate, sensuous only in so far as he is a gourmet of food and of language, aere perennius, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, bald-headed, pot-bellied, underbred, sycophantic, less poetic than any other great master of literature, occupies one complete volume of the British Museum Catalogue and about half the bad poetry in English might seem to have been written under his influence, but as almost no Englishman save Landor has ever written a line of real criticism this is not perhaps very surprising. There are people called the ‘English Critics’ (sometimes the gt. E.C.) who have put down a few rules of thumb about...
(read more)