Time, Gender, and the Erotic: Critical Orthodoxy and the Prospects for a Feminist Critique

The vast majority of recent commentary on Horace as a love poet falls into one of two categories: criticism informed by the privileging of a romantic version of love, or criticism informed by what might be called a notion of the poet as universal spokesman. In the first kind of criticism, what occurs is a deprecation of Horace's love poems for not according with the model of a Catullus, many of whose love poems seem to be a direct outpouring of emotion toward an idealized beloved with whom he wants a lasting relationship. In the second kind of criticism, Horace is hailed as a sober and wise man, with whom we should all identify, who "correctly observes" that love does not last. Thus in the first kind of criticism Horace is condemned for having the wrong approach to love—at least the wrong approach to be chosen for expression in love poetry—and in the second, he is endorsed for bringing a necessary realism to the area of love.

While these approaches at first glance appear to be radically different, they in fact share a common assumption, namely, that the proper focus of criticism is the reproduction of the poet's own conceptions of love. In the first case the result is a devaluation of Horace as a love poet for not producing a version of love characterized by the romantic ideal of timelessness. In the second, the result is a lauding of Horace for "correctly" perceiving romantic love as an impossibility. The problem with both positions, however, is that their effort to provide an accurate reproduction of Horace's view of love precludes any genuine critique of that view. The critics who devalue Horace because of his failure to accord with a romantic version of love assume that Horace's own views are self-evident, and thus do little to set the internal dynamics of the poems they discuss in relation to the romantic model of love that they privilege. While the critics who seek to defend Horace's view of love offer a needed corrective to such devaluation and also provide insightful explications of many of the love poems, their approach is limited, in turn, by an unconscious identification with the poet/lover, which produces a blindness to the problems that his male desire produces both for the beloved and for himself.

The critical approach to Horace as a love poet that privileges a romantic version of love is perhaps best exemplified by the statement of R. G. M. Nisbet: "None of Horace's love-poems (if that is the right name for them) reaches the first rank." Implicit in this remark is a judgment about Horace's love poetry that is based on an unstated assumption of what a love poem should be, yet Nisbet offers no clear and consistent notion of what would constitute a love poem, or more specifically, a good love poem. Nevertheless, the faults that he attributes to Horace as a love poet (lack of seriousness and involvement, artificiality, and unbelievability), and the poets with whom he compares Horace unfavorably (Catullus and Propertius), would suggest that the model that Horace fails to live up to is that of the romantic love poet. What Nisbet finds disturbing about Horace's love poetry is its remoteness from a romanticism that exhibits desire with the kind of directness and immediacy of, for example, a Propertius, whose poems (according to Nisbet) "are written with an earnestness and intensity that seem to be derived at least partly from real life." Thus, because Horace deals with desire in less overt ways than do romantic poets, he is unable to meet Nisbet's standards for good love poetry.

While somewhat less negative, the perspective of R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard on the love poems, as expressed in the introduction to their commentary on Book 1 of the Odes, retains the general sense of Nisbet's earlier criticisms. Their perspective is worth discussing at some length, both for the notions it contains, and for the influence that those notions have by appearing in the current standard commentary in English on the Odes. For them, the problem with Horace as a love poet seems to be his failure to produce the kind of love poetry with which they can be comfortable, that is, love poetry in the Catullan tradition. They assume that other present-day readers will have a similar response: "[t]he modern reader is apt to draw unfavorable comparisons with Catullus and Propertius, but they were intending something very different." What that "something ... different" is remains unstated, but one imagines that it has something to do with how Horace is perceived to handle the emotions of love: "Horace is not concerned with his own emotions; exceptions are embarrassing, however explicable in the context."

As far as the first part of this remark is concerned, what Nisbet and Hubbard do not seem to recognize is that "concern with one's emotions" need not be directly expressed. By the 1920s, literary critics outside of classics had already seen the problem with this reductive notion of what it means to deal with emotion, and it is worth recalling how fully New Criticism succeeded in exposing the inadequacy of reducing poetry to what is assumed to be the emotional life of the author. Thus, T. S. Eliot, in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), written in response to Romantic assumptions about poetry—most notably expressed in Wordsworth's description of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility"—attacks the notion that a poet in any straightforward fashion expresses his personality or his emotions through his poetry. Eliot argues that the poet works not in isolation but in relation to a literary tradition and that poetry is, in fact, in some sense "an escape from emotion" and "an escape from personality" although "only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

Still further, I. A. Richards, in Practical Criticism (1929), had eloquently challenged the notion that emotion mediated by reflection is somehow "insincere." Thus irony, "where the feeling really present is often the exact contrary to that overtly professed," should not be viewed "as insincere as simple readers often suppose it must be." The classicist Archibald Allen, writing more than three decades later, addresses some of these same issues in "Sunt qui Propertium malint," published, interestingly enough, in the same book of essays on elegy and lyric in which Nisbet's negative comment upon Horace's love odes appears. Allen persuasively argues that the seemingly spontaneous expression of emotion commonly identified with Propertius, for example, and not with Ovid, is in fact not always present in Propertius. More importantly, he discusses the fact that an ancient audience would have identified sincerity as a function of style, not of personality, and that as a consequence, sincerity has more to do with the persuasiveness of the poet's style than with the relationship between the poet's style...