SOURCE: Rogers, Pat. “‘An Allusion to Horace.’” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester, edited by Jeremy Treglown, pp. 166-76. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.

In this essay, Rogers provides a detailed analysis of “An Allusion to Horace” to show that Rochester's poem is written in a different cultural, linguistic, and critical context than the Horatian satire on which is depends, and argues that the work should be assessed as a seventeenth-century English poem and not compared too strictly with its first-century Latin inspiration.

The poem based on Horace's satire I. 10 has had its share of attention in recent years. It slithers in and out of the Critical Heritage volume, and it has been more extensively discussed in the past decade by Dustin H. Griffin, David Farley-Hills and others. There is also an important article by Howard Weinbrot.¹ I am in substantial agreement with the three critics named, for though...