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Horace Art Poetry Summary

Horace provides advice on writing poetry and drama in his work "Ars Poetica". He advocates for simplicity and uniformity. Horace tells writers to choose manageable subjects and weave words carefully. They should also use a style suited to their work. According to Horace, good writing requires sincerity, understanding audiences, and consistency. He offers specific guidance on techniques like using a chorus and avoiding deus ex machina. Horace stresses the importance of wisdom and experience for good writing.

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485 views1 page

Horace Art Poetry Summary

Horace provides advice on writing poetry and drama in his work "Ars Poetica". He advocates for simplicity and uniformity. Horace tells writers to choose manageable subjects and weave words carefully. They should also use a style suited to their work. According to Horace, good writing requires sincerity, understanding audiences, and consistency. He offers specific guidance on techniques like using a chorus and avoiding deus ex machina. Horace stresses the importance of wisdom and experience for good writing.

Uploaded by

Miguel António
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry)

In a terse plea for simplicity and uniformity in poetry, Horace captures the reader’s attention
with a graphic opening sentence:

If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread
feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here, now there, so that what
at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my
friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing?

With a cursory nod to the Piso family, to whom this work is dedicated, Horace turns his
attention to the subject at hand: how to write. Attempt a manageable subject, he advises, and
weave your words tastefully and carefully. Moreover, he adds, use a style suited to the nature
of the piece.

Crucial to the writing itself is sincerity, consistency, and an understanding of the audience:

If you want an approving hearer, one who waits for the curtain and will stay in
his seat until the singer cries, “Give your applause,” you must note the manners
of each age and give a fitting tone to the shifting natures and their years.

To ensure that the audience experiences the plot as vividly as possible, the poet should show
rather than tell the story. Horace notes that a wise playwright sticks to the traditional five-act
format and limits the actors to no more than three. In addition, a good playwright restrains
himself from reliance on the deus ex machina technique, by which a deity arrives on stage at a
crucial moment and solves human problems.

Horace offers more sage tidbits. For example, the chorus should follow its traditional role,
singing songs that relate to the plot:

It should side with the good and give friendly counsel; sway the angry and
cherish the righteous. It should praise the fare of a modest board; praise
wholesome justice, law, and peace with her open gates; should keep secrets; and
pray and beseech the gods that fortune may return to the unhappy and depart
from the proud.

The whole effect of dramatic art depends upon small conventions, including the careful
wording of each line according to an iambic cadence.

In general, Horace tells the neophyte writer: “Of good writing the source and fount is wisdom.”
To acquire wisdom, the beginner should “look to life and manners for a model and draw from
thence living words.” Poems, he declares, should benefit or amuse. If they instruct, they should
be brief. Once written, he warns, a work deserves careful criticism and a long period of rest
before it is published. “What you have not published,” Horace explains, “you can destroy; the
word once sent forth can never come back.”

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