Horace
In Our Time
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The Poems of Horace and the Poetics of Impotence
The epo is a sort of the ugly duckling horace's o and they, until recently, really hadn't received a lot of attention. Horace himself probably called them ambe, which refers to a meter iambics. The associations of this metre were with what we call blame poetry, insult obscenity, attack poetry. Ande he was channelling an archaic greek poet, archilocus, who was reputed to have attacked his enemies so virulently that this family committed suicide. They hung themselves. So this was poetry as weaponas as instrument, and attack poetry, which would have been appropriate to the period in which he is writing them,. period
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