The Latin poet Horace is, along with his friend Virgil, the most celebrated of the poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and, with Virgil, the most influential. These marvelously constructed poems with their unswerving clarity of vision and their extraordinary range of tone and emotion have deeply affected the poetry of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herbert, Dryden, Marvell, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Frost, Larkin, Auden, and many others, in English and in other languages. Now David Ferry, the acclaimed poet and translator of Gilgamesh, has made an inspired new translation of the complete Odes of Horace, one that conveys the wit, ardor and sublimity of the original with a music of all its own.
