ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling commonly wrote his most poignant and personal verse when he had taken steps to be most removed from his own standpoint and circumstances. Kipling probably entertained, but never fully believed, the doctrine of reincarnation. Kipling's final view of Horace is not one of any kind of identification, as the models of possession or reincarnation would have implied. Kipling exercised the faculty for which Eliot praised him — distinguishing a poem which has forced its way into Horace's consciousness from others which Horace himself has forced. Curiously, three of these are the three nineteenth Odes — 1.19 lust, 2.19 inspiration and 3.19 drunkenness — as if Horace had consciously tried to set an ecstatic poem at that point in each book, and failed for very self-consciousness. The drunkenness of 3.19 has as a minor component Horace's desire for Glycera, which is the main theme of 1.19, Mater saeva Cupidinum.
