Snow and Spring: Horace's Soracte Ode Again

Abstract

Why is it that literary criticism, at least where classical authors are concerned, must always go from one extreme to the other? Mr. Catlow's article on Horace's Soracte ode is a case in point. Nisbet and Hubbard, in their effort to ‘show how a very literary poet takes over themes conventional in various genres and adapts them to his new idiom’, may have underplayed the originality on which Horace himself so often and so emphatically insists and the imaginative qualities to which his poetry owes much of its perennial appeal. Understandably, Mr. Catlow reacts against this approach; but in his interpretation of the imaginative and evocative qualities of the ode he not merely underplays but altogether ignores Horace's literary pedigree, the lex operis within which Horace (like all other classical poets) wrote, the formal structure of the ode itself, and finally the context of the collection within which this particular ode occupies a prominent and carefully chosen place.