From a Sabine Jar: Reading Horace, Odes 1.9

by Lowell Edmunds

This book is a detailed study of a single poem -- Horace, Odes 1.9 -- often called 'The Soracte Ode' after the mountain named in its second line. Although more than seventy articles and parts of books have been devoted to this twenty-four line poem since the beginning of the last century, Lowell Edmunds is the first scholar to apply developments in literary theory from outside the field of classics to a discussion of the ode. Specifically, he uses Hans Robert Jauss's essay on Baudelaire's "Spleen (II)" as a model for his study.

According to Edmunds, attempts to answer aesthetic questions about ancient lyric poems typically begin with philological or historical facts -- which scholars present as new evidence, heretofore undiscovered or misunderstood -- and proceed to an analysis built on those facts. Edmunds argues that contemporary literary theory provides a different way of reconciling the aestheic and historical claims of a lyric poem, ancient or modern. He then takes a fresh look at Horace's poem, employing Jauss's method of performing three successive readings of the the first aesthetic or perceptual, the second interpretive, and the third historicist.

In this hermeneutic Jaussian approach, Edmunds shows, the unity of the poem appears in the process of reading rather than, as in a philological approach, in the analysis of it. Moreover, he labels an emphasis on the act of reading itself, distinct from analysis, as the main difference between philological and hermeneutical ways of understanding a poem. Focusing on this contrast, he surveys the history of the ode's reception and scholarly interpretation. In the final chapter, he briefly considers deconstruction as an alternative critical method. Assessing the rival claims of hermeneutics, deconstruction, and philology as interpretive tools, Edmunds concludes by favoring hermeneutics.

Originally published in 1992.

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178 pages, Hardcover

First published February 24, 1992

About the author

Lowell Edmunds is an emeritus professor of Classics at Rutgers University with research interests in Greek literature and mythology.

Reviews

[Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's say an actor were to give a staged reading of the same poem three times in a row but as a different character each time. He would hope to convey something different in each reading. While the text would stay the same, the effect would change.

Such is the goal of Lowell Edmunds' treatment of Horace, Odes 1.9. The poem has bewildered and intrigued readers for centuries. Donne and Cowper had their stabs at translating it. Scholars and poets have commented on it across two millenia. (I admit to translating it, very poorly, as a Christmas gift for a friend my second year of college). And yet, as it always seems in academe, there's something more to say.

Edmunds subjects the poem to three successive readings. His tools are different each time and divide roughly along the lines of New Criticism, New Historicism, and Reception theory. The overall binding for his interpretive strategy derives from the approach that Hans Robert Jauss took to French poetry, where he tried to establish the original reader's "horizon of expectations" and compare it with the current reader's horizon. After these three approaches, Edmunds' epilogue performs a deconstructive reading. It is in this final scene that Edmunds' treatment says perhaps more about Edmunds' era and the literary approaches common to it than it does about the poem. The first three readings make sense. What does the poem itself say, what did it say to its ancient audience, and what has it said to later audiences? The cleverness of the deconstructive reading is that it attempts to combine all three previous readings: the language of the poem (first reading) establishes a set of intertextual references (second reading) that, for a later reader (third reading), produces "undecidability."

Edmunds claims that his deconstructive reading liberates the female character who appears at the poem's end. He suggests that her power over the poem's addressee is commensurate with the power that time ultimately holds over him: that is, the addressee will lose out to both. This is an ingenious way of reading the poem, but it falls short in one crucial aspect. For while time will fail the addressee, but it will also fail the poem's speaker, whose language creates the very images he can no longer experience (he's too old to be flirting with girls). The girl links the poem's speaker and addressee more than anything else. She is both the remembered lover and the current lover. The speaker calls her to mind; in doing so, he verbally re-enacts something that he has lost. What Edmunds misses is the effect of this link. The speaker and the addressee converge. Time remembered and time predicted intersect. Time present holds both in its hands. The poem does not deconstruct but rather constructs. The old speaker and the young addressee are brought together by the image of the girl.