Horace Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Mary Rebecca Thayer

Critical Essay by Mary Rebecca Thayer

SOURCE: Thayer, Mary Rebecca. Introduction to The Influence of Horace on the Chief English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 11-51. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1916.

In the following essay, Thayer begins by discussing what Horace shares of himself and his work through his poetry, and how he was viewed by his contemporaries. She goes on to suggest poets with whom Horace can reasonably be compared, choosing Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Browning among others.

In order properly to discuss the influence of one writer upon another, it is necessary to determine as nearly as may be for what each of them stands; for the measure of real influence is, after all, the amount of sympathy which exists between the two. Therefore, prior to taking up the relation of Horace to nineteenth-century English poetry, we must endeavor to obtain a true idea of him as he shows himself to...
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