SHATTERING TRADITION: A REJECTION OF ANALYSIS BY GENRE IN HORACE’S ARS POETICA 1

The following paper undertakes a critical review and examination of the various attempts over the last century and a half of scholarship in Classical Philology to categorize that most singular work of Horace, the Ars poetica. Commentators and critics of the poem have endeavoured to include the work of the Augustan poet within various pre-determined — somewhat tendentious — generic categories, including: the didactic treatise, the verse letter, the literary epistle, the didactic poem, and the sermo. Through critiquing these approaches I shall argue that the Ars, whether through form or subject, manages to subvert the criteria of these generic boundaries, and locates itself within a unique territory. Apart from addressing the problems involved in classifying the Ars, this paper also tackles some other general concerns of generic analysis in Classical Philology. In the following paper I shall explore and criticize various scholarly attempts to classify the genre of that most eclectic and farraginous work of Horace, the Ars poetica. This paper must, accordingly, be pardoned for being essentially destructive in nature: but I believe that it will only be possible for critical analyses of the poem to advance once we have cast ourselves free of the excess baggage — that is, generic expectations — which is frequently prescribed for our comprehension of this most singular composition in the Horatian oeuvre. As a starting point, the very name, the ‘Ars poetica’, should suggest to us a type of philosophical or didactic prose treatise. The problem, of course, is that we do not know whether this was the title which Horace himself gave to his poem; indeed, we do not even know whether Horace had in fact created a definitive title for publication (Rudd 1989:19). Quintilian, in the following century, bestowed the titles of ‘Ars poetica ’ and ‘Liber de arte poetica ’ upon the poem.2 Wilkin