The Latin poet Horace is, along with his friend Virgil, the most celebrated of the poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and, with Virgil, the most influential. These marvelously constructed poems with their unswerving clarity of vision and their extraordinary range of tone and emotion have deeply affected the poetry of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herbert, Dryden, Marvell, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Frost, Larkin, Auden, and many others, in English and in other languages.

Now David Ferry, the acclaimed poet and translator of Gilgamesh, has made an inspired new translation of the complete Odes of Horace, one that conveys the wit, ardor and sublimity of the original with a music of all its own.

""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 Horce 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 1740's; 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