The Ancient Roman Poet Horace's "Art of Poetry" and the Art of Living

FAIN: FT-260387-18

Jennifer Laura Ferriss-Hill
University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL 33146-2919)

Research and preparation for a book on the Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry), poem by the ancient Roman poet Horace (65-8 BCE).

Horace’s Art of Poetry and the Art of Living approaches Horace’s Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry) as a work of literature in its own right, and one that occupies a key place in the poet’s oeuvre. This 476-line poem has stood for two millennia alongside Aristotle’s Poetics as a canonical work of literary theory, taken largely as what it professes itself to be: a handbook, written under commission, for how to write drama. I argue that it should rather be read in the context of Horace’s other hexameter writings, and in particular as a companion and counterpart to his Satires. Just as throughout the Satires, his earliest poems, Horace encodes literary prescriptions into his advice on how to live well, so I contend that the Ars Poetica, thought to be his final work, may be read as a manual for how to live that masquerades as a treatise on poetics.

Associated Products

Horace's "Ars Poetica": Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living (Book)
Title: Horace's "Ars Poetica": Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living
Author: Jennifer Ferriss-Hill
Editor: Jessica Yao, Robert Tempio
Abstract: Horace's "Ars Poetica": Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living, offers a reading of a Horatian poem that has been read and taught continuously for over two millennia. Arguing that the poem's contents are contained in the words of its opening lines, Ferriss-Hill shows how Horace's concern with the human, with the Piso family, with friendship, laughter, and criticism, and with writing as an activity parallel to living run the entire length of the work.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691195025/horaces-ars-poetica
Primary URL Description: Publisher website
Access Model: Print book.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0691195025
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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