Book contents
- The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome
- The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Editions of Main Texts
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Local Dwelling and Pastoral Place in Vergil’s Eclogues
- Chapter 2 The Local Environments and More-Than-Human Music of the Eclogues
- Chapter 3 Vergil’s Ecological Poem
- Chapter 4 Poetry of Place and Planet
- Chapter 5 Natures and the Nonhuman in Horace’s Odes
- Chapter 6 Translocal Lyric
- Epilogue
- References
- Index Locorum
- General Index
Chapter 5 - Natures and the Nonhuman in Horace’s Odes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2024
- The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome
- The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Editions of Main Texts
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Local Dwelling and Pastoral Place in Vergil’s Eclogues
- Chapter 2 The Local Environments and More-Than-Human Music of the Eclogues
- Chapter 3 Vergil’s Ecological Poem
- Chapter 4 Poetry of Place and Planet
- Chapter 5 Natures and the Nonhuman in Horace’s Odes
- Chapter 6 Translocal Lyric
- Epilogue
- References
- Index Locorum
- General Index
Summary
This chapter elaborates a contextualized account of Horace’s interests in nature and the nonhuman. It traces the connections in his lyric poetry between the nonhuman environment and various concepts of nature. Drawing on long-standing poetic traditions, as well as developments in Hellenistic philosophy, Horace forges a poetry in which distilled perceptions of the nonhuman world undergird insights into ethical concepts of nature by which humans should live their lives. The chapter finds in this poetics a complex form of nature poetry that usefully complicates that concept within the history of the lyric. In order to write this poetry, Horace authenticates his vatic status through claims about his own special relationship with the nonhuman environment and the gods. Horace’s special connection to the divine allows him to enjoy a privileged relationship with his nonhuman surroundings. And it is because of this status that he can command us with urgency and authority to attend to our environments. Horace represents himself as a supernatural poet of nature, whose literary achievement transcends nature even as it teaches about nature’s limits.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Environmental Poetry of Augustan Rome , pp. 180 - 227Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024