Non-Lyric and Lyric in Horace's Odes
The Poetics of Disguise and Infiltration
Sheds new light on Horace's metapoetics, uncovering patterns in the metaphors of the Odes
Description
Kenneth Draper’s new volume investigates genre, gender, and self-presentation in Horace’s first collection of Odes. It examines how Horace uses non-lyric genres—elegy, epic, invective, and philosophical discourse—to define his lyric project, responding to the rhetorical challenge of writing in the wake of civil war. It shows how Horace employs a “poetics of disguise and infiltration” in his engagement with these other genres. At times, he assimilates his lyric persona to an elegiac one, claiming to share elegy’s effeminacy and disinterest in politics. Similarly, he draws on philosophical discourse to present himself as too modest for heavy political themes. In both cases, he turns to clothing metaphors to identify the slight persona as a disguise that he may assume or discard as needed. Through this disingenuous self-presentation, he disavows interest in the masculine modes of epic and invective. Read as reflections on Horace’s own infiltration of epic territory, the examined scenes give clues about his motivations: focusing on the characters’ self-preservation amid dangers, he reminds readers of the risks and audacity of his project.
Kenneth Draper is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University.
Reviews
“Non-Lyric and Lyric in Horace’s Odes is ambitious, interesting, novel, convincing, and fun. One of the most significant and influential studies of Horace in recent years, this book will appeal both to specialists and to occasional readers or teachers of Horace, and to anyone interested in metapoetics and the interplay of genre and gender.”
- James O'Hara, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“As a novel metapoetic and intertextual interpretation of Horace, Non-Lyric and Lyric in Horace’s Odes stands to enrich scholarship on the Odes, while the connections it makes to contemporary Roman poets like Vergil and Propertius, and generic forebears like Sappho, Alcaeus, or Catullus, will appeal to scholars of classical literature more broadly.”
- Tedd Wimperis, Elon University
“Combining many threads from recent scholarship with his own fresh insights, Draper demonstrates how Horace’s various ‘disguises’ in Odes 1-3 allow him to infiltrate dangerous poetic and political territory. This brilliant analysis will give readers a new appreciation of Horace’s metapoetic genius.”
- Julia Hejduk, Baylor University