How The Complete Poems drew on The Odes of Horace
A documented line of influence: Andrew Marvell demonstrably engaged Horatius’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Odes of Horace
Horatius · 23 BCE
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Complete Poems
Andrew Marvell · 1681
PoetsRelevance
9/10
On The Complete Poems’s page
- Marvell's 'Horatian Ode' wears its debt in the title — it's a deliberate English imitation of Horace's Odes
- From them it takes the stanza form, the Augustan address to a new ruler, and that famously double-edged political ambivalence
- Read Horace first (the Odes IV.4 especially) and you can see Marvell measuring Cromwell against an emperor
On The Odes of Horace’s page
- Horace's Odes gave Andrew Marvell his most famous poem its shape and its name — 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'
- Marvell carried the Horatian stanza into English — two long lines, two short — and, more telling, Horace's wary ambivalence before a new ruler
- The Roman's Augustan poise, admiring and uneasy at once, is exactly the tone Marvell turns on Cromwell