Horatian

I am going to celebrate her here in a Horatian ode, with apologies to John Keats, the world’s most celebrated odist, the 19th-century British genius behind “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and other such works featuring insanely eccentric rhyme schemes.

In “How the Classics Made Shakespeare,” Jonathan Bate — provost of Worcester College, Oxford, as well as a scholar of remarkable industry — probes what one might call the Ovidian, Virgilian, Horatian, Ciceronian, Plutarchan and Senecan undergirdings to the many Shakespearean works with strong classical associations.

Horatian satire, named after Horace, is low-key, mild and designed not to really get anyone’s knickers in a twist.

The Sonnets were followed, at an Horatian interval, by other poems hardly of an inferior quality: such, for instance, as his "Hope, an Allegorical Sketch"—"St. Michael's Mount"—"Coombe Ellen"—and "Grave of Howard."

In fact, he is known for being a master of two styles of satire; the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.