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Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horation Lyric Discourse

University of California Press

What I have said also makes it clear that the poet's task is saying not what happened but the kind of thing that might happen. . .. That is why poetry is at once more philosophical and more worthwhile [spoudaioteron] than history, since poetry tends to make universal statements, whereas those of history are particular.
Aristotle Poetics 1451b

The view of Horatian lyric discourse developed in this study derives from critical premises that are best enunciated at the outset, since they often run counter to prevalent assumptions about the poet's modes of organization. The Horatian ode has been so seminal, both in form and content, to the historical evolution of European lyric that it has been relatively easy even for erudite readers to take its organizational principles for granted and to yield to a kind of interpretative inertia born, in part, of unexamined assumptions. Where my proposed readings conflict substantially with some time-honored preconceptions enshrined in the exegetical literature, I have sought to clarify the ramifications of competing interpretations in a manner at once specific and non-polemical. A general overview of my guiding principles and procedures is, however, a necessary preliminary to the specific analyses that constitute the core of this book.

The Horatius lyricus who emerges in these essays may be characterized most aptly as a philosophical poet in the widest sense. The epithet philosophical may be misleading if it conjures up images of versified ratiocination or jejune argumentation adapted to metrical constraints. As a first approximation to my view of the poet as philosopher, I do not shrink from espousing the well-known Aristotelian judgment (cited as the epigraph to this Prologue) that draws a rudimentary distinction between historical and poetic discourse. Such a conception of the nature of the poetic task does not erase or

downgrade the importance of vivid and concrete representation. Thanks to Horace's superb pictorial gifts, Mount Soracte stands out sharply in our minds, as do the limpid waters of the Fons Bandusiae or the antics of the coquettish Licymnia. Graphic description, however, may function as a powerful vehicle of ideas in a poet who is deeply concerned with ethical values and for whom the particular exists, in the phraseology of the Poetics , "for the sake of the universal" rather than vice versa. Whether we are dealing with sympotic "foil" (a winter scene in the Soracte ode), an emblem of poetic inspiration (the fountain of Bandusia) or an incarnation of erotic lyric (Licymnia), the composer of the Odes is primarily engagedso at least I hope to sustainin conveying ideas and philosophical insights in a manner that is rhetorically persuasive.

A major predicate of these investigations, therefore, is that the Odes embody what I may refer to without fear of oxymoron as "lyric argument"with a glance at the etymological sense of the Latin argumenturn ("proof"). To see a poem as "proving" a point appears to go against the grain of entrenched neoromantic assumptions about the genesis and nature of lyric, but anyone who has looked at a facsimile of Keats's autograph of "Ode to a Nightingale" and observed the meticulous revisions and corrections inscribed therein would do well to ponder the paradoxical implications of Wordsworth's characterization of poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Whatever the emotional fountainheads of particular romantic texts may prove to be, it is clear that the feelings described in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"to follow up my English lyric exemplarare demonstrably supportive of the thought, and such gnomic utterances as "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter" are, not merely digressions into the abstract, but pivotal stages in an ongoing argument. The New Critics and formalists of a generation or more ago rightly insisted on the inseparability of "form" and "content," not to mention the famous "heresy of paraphrase," but it would be a regrettable distortion of their critical legacy if we allowed these sound axioms to sponsor a devaluation of the ideational element in lyric poetry.

The poet of the Carmina , we may safely posit, desires to persuade. The discursive routes to persuasion are, however, manifold. Rather than proceeding by the more austere methods of syllogism,

Horatian lyric discourse typically "argues" a coherent nexus of ideas through nuanced variations in form and presentation. The building-blocks of these arguments consist of motifs, topoi, recurrent metaphors, and rhetorical conventions that, for the most part, are set forth paratactically. When one of Horace's major models, Sappho, abandons parataxis and introduces an illustrative exemplum with the words "It is easy to make this clear to all," she is merely bringing to the surface a discursive goal of "proving" her insightful proposition that "whatever one loves is the most beautiful" (16 LP, lines 3-6). Both Sappho and Horace frequently elide such overt delineation of the logical links between motifs in their poems. A paramount task of interpretation, therefore, is to unearth and reconstruct the underlying connections as well as the main lines of unfolding lyric arguments.

The enterprise I have adumbrated is fraught with hermeneutic perils, not the least of which is the justly notorious "intentional fallacy." My conception of the "lyric argument" obviously presupposes some form of intentionality: the lyrist is assumed to be interested in persuading the reader to accept a particular way of looking at the world. Though didactic intentions in an author's mind may be irretrievable, there is an important sense in which an intrinsic rhetorical goal may be said to be partly accessible in the text, and it is the latter kind of formally determined telos that is the primary focus of my analyses (cf. Geoffrey Leech 1983, 13). To illustrate tersely the difference between a limited, textually immanent rhetorical goal and an unverifiable authorial intention extrinsic to the text, let us briefly consider the case of the now well-described device that goes by the name of priamel .1 No one who is familiar with the most common and easily recognizable form of this device ("some like X, others Y, I like Z") would balk at the inference that a stated preference on the part of the speaker is its ulterior goal. The device, in brief, contains its own internal logica logic manifest in a clear rhetorical sequence of foil and climax. Of course, poets may and do manipulate our patterned expectations by altering, postponing, and even deleting the climactic term; nevertheless the sense of "goal-directedness" inherent in the array of alternative choices persists despite truncations and radical abbreviations. Robert Frost's playfully perverse variations on the "cap" of the priamel are a succinct case in...