The Odes of Horace

"Here is an English Horace worthy of his Roman name—the poet of the odes who ranges freely from the senatorial to the sotte voce, from the immortal Olympians to the limits of mortality, the master of the hearth dispensing wine and vintage wisdom. Here is Horace presented afresh in the deft and handsome, sinewy English verses of David Ferry. A translation that should earn, as the Roman poet earns, our thanks and admiration."—Robert Fagles

"We must be grateful for what Ferry has accomplished. This is a Horace for our times."—Bernard Knox, The New York Review of Books

"We finally have an English Horace whose rhythmical subtlety and variety do justice to the Latin poet's own inventiveness, in which emotion rises from the motion of the verse . . . To sense the achievement, one has to read the collection as a whole . . . and they can take one's breath away even as they continue breathing."—Rosanna Warren, The Threepenny Review

"Certainly David Ferry's Horace is a book to place next to Robert Fitzgerald's Aeneid . . . If you want all the odes—and you should—this is the volume to buy, read, and treasure."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"[David Ferry] has done what nobody has been able to do since . . . the 1740s; he has found a voice, contemporary and yet Horatian, through which that poetical wonder, the Odes of Horace, can address us."—D. S. Carne-Ross, The New Criterion

"There is no end here to power and delicacy and variety. Ferry's Odes is a book one will always have and always read."—Rodney Gove Dennis, Harvard Review

"David Ferry's translation of Horace's odes in this bilingual edition brings to the modern reader a splendid rendition of Horace's style and meaning. Ferry, an emeritus professor of English at Wellesley College, is a poet and essayist. His verse excellently captures Horace's often conversational and sometimes ironic mode, which at times resembles that of Robert Frost or W. H. Auden."—Anthony Day, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review