Horace: Poems

A wide-ranging selection of the work of one of ancient Rome’s master poets--and originator of the phrase "carpe diem"--whose influence on poetry can be traced down through the centuries into our own time. EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY POCKET POETS.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, who lived from 65 to 8 BCE, saw the death of the Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire, and was personally acquainted with the emperor Augustus and the poet Virgil. He was famous during his lifetime, and continued to be posthumously, for his odes and epodes, for his satires and epistles, and for Ars Poetica. His lyric poems, brief and allusive, have been translated into many languages, most particularly into English, by a range of famous poets, including Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, A. E. Houseman, Ezra Pound, Louis McNeice, Robert Lowell--and even Queen Elizabeth I and the Victorian prime minister Gladstone. And Horace’s injunction to "seize the day" has echoed through the ages. This anthology of superb English translations will show how Horace has permeated English literature for five centuries, and continues to do so.