‘An Allusion to Horace’, Jonson's Ghost and the Second Poets' War

Summary

Post-Romantic conceptions of originality make it difficult for us to regard as other than paradoxical the claim that ‘An Allusion to Horace’, the poem in which Rochester is most indebted to a precursor, is also one of his most original contributions to English poetry. If Rochester was not quite the first English poet to press a Roman satire into the service of his own times, he was the first to appreciate that this could be done systematically over the length of an entire poem, to wit Horace's Satire 1.10. Doubtless, Rochester did not intuit the full potential of this new medium. That would come, not so much through the greater poetic genius of Alexander Pope, as through Pope's more developed understanding of the phenomenology of reading the ‘imitation’. As soon as you cease to rely on your reader's hazy memory of the original Latin, and print it in juxtaposition to your own English, using typography when necessary to call attention to your own especially felicitous adaptations, knowing departures and virtuoso puns, you achieve effects that were not possible for Rochester. Where, for instance, Rochester could simply omit an Horatian passage that he did not see as having any relevance to contemporary circumstances (such as that commencing ‘scilicet oblitus patriaeque’, in which Horace condemns that practice of adulterating the native satiric strain with Greek words), later satirists like Pope and Johnson, fearing that the reader would construe this as a ‘cop-out’, would invest far more effort in inventing parallel circumstances.