‘The Best of Lyrick Poets'

Horace, the Best of Lyrick Poets ran the title of a volume of translations of selected odes and epodes of Horace which was published in 1652, echoing The Lyrick Poet of John Smith three years earlier. This chapter surveys the vicissitudes of Horace's reputation in England, from the early period in which he was regarded primarily as a satirist until his final acceptance as a lyric poet in the seventeenth century, and discusses the English translations produced before 1670. The classics had for centuries an ambiguous position in the Christian culture of the Latin West. Throughout the later middle ages Horace was read as a school-text, admired for the morality of the Satires. Horace gained a new popularity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the revival of classical studies and the vogue for satire, as a consequence of which the Odes still took second place to the Satires and Epistles.