The Genesis of Byron's Hints from Horace

Abstract

'Horace', observed Ezra Pound, 'would seem to confer no boons upon his translators.'1 We could go further, and say that the invocation of Horace's name has been a mortification for the many writers who felt bound to fulfil the 'utile dulci' ideal of the Arspoetica. This Horatian ideal was notorious enough for Byron to joke about the expectation it raised in his readers in Don Juan (XIII, 81). But Byron's readers did not, in his lifetime, have an opportunity to see the text of his verse translation of the Ars poetica, first published in a complete form posthumously, in 183 1. Even today, Byron's version, known as Hints from Horace, is seldom read and less often discussed. This essay will examine the relationship between Horace's poem and Byron's. I shall consider the contexts of Byron's work on the Hints in two distinct periods of his life, showing how the changed circumstances of his later career inflected his revision of the text, and explore the ways in which Byron's version both reaffirms his allegiance to classical aesthetics and subverts an ideal of cultural refinement that had become synonymous with Horace's name. Horace's literary criticism had been accepted in England as the standard guide to the civilizing effect of poetry from the Renaissance onwards. Several major scholarly editions of the Ars poetica were produced in England during the eighteenth century, although it was the content rather than the form of the poem that was cited as commendable.2 George Colman's 1783 translation of the Ars poetica was prefaced by a dedicatory letter describing the poem as one which