Horace and His Influence

will be still better appreciated if we

character-drawing; to avoid, on the one hand, clearness at the cost of diffuseness, and, on the other, brevity at the cost of obscurity; to choose subject-matter suited to one's powers; to respect the authority of the masterpiece 135 and to con by night and by day the great Greek exemplars; to feel the emotion one wishes to rouse; to stamp the universal with the mark of individual genius; to be straightforward and rapid and omit the unessential; to be truthful to life; to keep the improbable and the horrible behind the scenes; to be appropriate in meter and diction; to keep clear of the fallacy of poetic madness; to look for the real sources of successful writing in sanity, depth of knowledge, and experience with men; to remember the mutual indispensability of genius and cultivation; to combine the pleasant and the useful; to deny one's self the indulgence of

th which the Ars Poetica was mainly concerned. The persuasive and authoritative counsels of the Roman poet have entered, so to speak, into the circulatory system