SOURCE: Weinbrot, Howard D. “‘An Allusion to Horace’: Rochester's Imitative Mode.” Studies in Philology 69, no. 3 (July, 1972): 348-68.

In the essay which follows, Weinbrot contends that “An Allusion to Horace” is unsatisfying because it lacks complexity and depth of the Horatian satire to which it alludes, and states that the main reason for this lack of depth is that the creative strengths of Imitation as a genre are not yet clear in Rochester's work.

In recent years students of Restoration and eighteenth-century satire have learned a new respect for the variety and sophistication of the Augustan Imitation.¹ No longer do we praise the modern poet for imitating, say, Horace, closely, or blame him for imitating freely.² Nor are we surprised to find him both free and close at different moments in the same poem, or to find that he has imitated only a portion of the parent-poem or that...