Orazio contro Orazio in «River Duddon», 1 di William Wordsworth

Abstract

This article examines the first sonnet of W. Wordsworth’s River Duddon collection in the light of its relationship to Horace. In the sonnet’s complex intertextual network, the memory of two carmina, Ode 3,13 and 1,38, is closely intertwined. Ode 3,13, the subject of a ‘widespread rewriting’ in Wordsworth’s oeuvre, is openly quoted to emphasise the literary nature of the text (according to contemporary readers’ tastes), but is also rejected as a model to make way for a new form of poetry inspired by direct contact with nature. The memory of Ode 1,38 is much less explicit, but has a more radical influence on the development of the sonnet: Wordsworth appropriates the Priamel embedded in the Horatian text to assert, like Horace, his own poetic choices. The Horatian memory that pervades the text thus moves in two different directions: on the one hand, Horatian poetry is presented as no longer relevant; on the other, it is profoundly assimilated in its compositional structure. This contradiction confirms Wordsworth’s paradoxical relationship with the classics, as noted in earlier studies.