This book, first published in 1993 and a celebration of the bimillennium of Horace's death and a successor to Ovid Renewed (Cambridge University Press, 1988), explores in a balanced and comprehensive way, the presence of Horace in English letters and culture from the Renaissance onwards, in the form of a series of critical essays. It shows that there has been a continuous interest in Horace throughout the modern period, whereas it is often supposed that Horace's influence was only of central importance in the eighteenth century. Horace indeed is a major (if often hidden) element in the...

Conversing with Antiquity collects, in a substantially revised and updated form, studies of the reception of the classics by English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by one of the leading scholars in the field. A new Introduction locates the book's investigations within the context of current debates between aestheticians and cultural historians about the reception of classical culture. Where some recent studies have regarded English poets' dealings with the classics as acts of 'appropriation', or even 'colonialization', David Hopkins emphasizes the element of dialogic...