SOURCE: "The English Horace in Defense of Literature: Matthew Prior's Early Satires," in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 19-37.

In the following essay, Nelson traces the development of Prior's satires, which began as expressions of personal invective and evolved into more considered satiric commentary on human types rather than specific individuals and often included elements of self-deprecation.

By the early eighteenth century, Matthew Prior had already acquired the title of the "English Horace" because of his evident attraction to the great Latin poet of antiquity and occasional imitation of his work (Goad 90).¹ Since that time, this identification has generally been accepted without qualification, so that Prior's poetry is still commonly described in Horatian terms, as being easy, elegant, and urbane. George Sherburn perhaps best summarizes this approach to Prior the poet in The Literary History of England, where he claims that Prior "became perhaps the...