Personal Narrative and the Fantastic, or, the Poet Out of Bounds

Abstract

Abstract Mostly, the stories Horace tells about himself engage poetics, no matter the genre. A cavalier blend of the mundane with the fantastic characterizes the lyric stories. The poet averts a wolf’s attack by singing; he misplaces his shield (like a good lyrist), and Mercury air-lifts him from battle; his near death by a falling tree (almost) causes an underworld vision of Sappho and Alcaeus; he witnesses Bacchus teaching nymphs and satyrs their lessons; he turns into a swan; doves ward off vipers and bears from the infant Horace with a tent of symbolic herbs. Poetics binds these stories, even beyond shared motifs. Horace constructs a personal history for himself not as Q. Horatius Flaccus, but as lyrist — that is, ‘personal’ has to do with persona, and, as will become clear, is hardly antithetical to ‘political’. Historical author and literary persona can and do overlap, but the grounding of the lyric poet in a Personal Myth looks to the historical author’s personal story only as fodder for translation into a poetic mythology. The disparity between l’effet du reel and the marvellous forces us to recognize the importance of these events in what the poet makes of them rather than for any intrinsic significance: seeing a wolf is certainly something to tell the neighbours, even if a relatively ordinary occurrence, but only becomes the ground for a poetic manifesto through an act of imagination.