P1: RPU/... P2: RPU 0521830028c10.xml CUUK662B-Harrison September 8, 2006 8:59 10 ANDREW LAIRD The Ars Poetica The title ‘Ars Poetica’ (‘The art of poetry’) was very possibly attached to Horace’s verse letter to the Pisones before we find it used by Quintilian at the end of the first century ce. 1 That title hints at the universal status of this didactic poem as a pre-eminent, authoritative and, in every sense, ‘classical’ manual on the composition of poetry. The Ars provided an object of imita- tion, as well as a code of practice, for Renaissance poets and playwrights; it continued to be the paradigm for neo-classical literature and aesthetics; and even some modernist writers of the twentieth century responded, or else owed something, to its prescriptions. 2 There is no doubt that this single com- position by Horace – at 476 hexameters his longest – has exercised far more influence than any of his other individual poems, and more even than his collections of poems. The later reception of Ars Poetica, like that of Plato’s Republic, is of far more consequence than its significance for the period in which it was originally produced. At the same time, the recent tendency to consider Horace’s poem on poet- ics as a ‘literary epistle’ points to the way in which it can be imagined in 1 Quintilian, who also calls it the liber de arte poetica ‘book on the art of poetry’ (Institutio Oratoria 8.3.60), quotes this single poem on eight occasions (cf. Index of Russell’s Loeb Quintilian iv) – more frequently than any other single poem of Horace, and almost as many times as he quotes from all four books of the Odes. The stature of the Ars Poetica for Quintilian is affirmed by the prominent reference to the work in his Preface (2), where Quintilian claims to have applied Horace’s recommendation to his own prose treatise. For detailed discussion of the poem’s title in antiquity, see Fischer (1991) 5–16. 2 The manifestos of the Imagist movement, penned by Ezra Pound in the early 1900s and reprinted in Jones (2001), bear comparison to some sentiments in the Ars. Willett (1964) 270 records Brecht’s unsurprisingly negative verdict on the account of how poetry should arouse emotion in Ars 99–103: ‘I must say there is only one word for such an operation: barbaric.’ For medieval and Renaissance reception and imitation, see the ‘Further reading’ recommended at the end of this chapter. 132