An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word anagram can be rearranged into nag a ram, or the word binary into brainy or the word adobe into abode.
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek: ἐπίγραμμα epigramma 'inscription' from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein 'to write on, to inscribe', and the literary device has been employed for over two millennia.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."
Marcus Valerius Martialis was a Roman poet from Hispania best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these short, witty poems he cheerfully satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets.
Carpe diem is a Latin aphorism, usually translated "seize the day", taken from book 1 of the Roman poet Horace's work Odes.
Gaius Valgius Rufus, Latin poet, friend of Horace and Maecenas, was suffect consul of the Roman Empire in 12 BC.
The Odes are a collection in four books of Latin lyric poems by Horace. The Horatian ode format and style has been emulated since by other poets. Books 1 to 3 were published in 23 BC. According to the journal Quadrant, they were "unparalleled by any collection of lyric poetry produced before or after in Latin literature". A fourth book, consisting of 15 poems, was published in 13 BC.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from the Roman lyrical poet Horace's Odes (III.2.13). The line is usually translated as: "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country." The Latin word patria, meaning the country of one's fathers or ancestors, is the source of the French word for a country, patrie, as well as the English word patriot.
The Epistles of Horace were published in two books, in 20 BCE and 14 BCE, respectively.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
William Bourchier, 3rd Earl of Bath was Lord Lieutenant of Devon. His seat was at Tawstock Court, three miles south of Barnstaple in North Devon, which he rebuilt in the Elizabethan style in 1574, the date being sculpted on the surviving gate house.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Thomas Drant (c.1540–1578) was an English clergyman and poet. Work of his on prosody was known to Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. He was in the intellectual court circle known as the 'Areopagus', and including, as well as Sidney, Edward Dyer, Gabriel Harvey, and Daniel Rogers. He translated Horace into English, taking a free line in consideration of the Roman poet's secular status; but he mentioned he found Horace harder than Homer. Drant's translation was the first complete one of the Satires in English, in fourteeners, but makes some radical changes of content.
Sir William Browne FRS was an English doctor.
Walter Quin (1575?–1640) was an Irish poet who worked in Scotland and England for the House of Stuart.
Iambus or iambic poetry was a genre of ancient Greek poetry that included but was not restricted to the iambic meter and whose origins modern scholars have traced to the cults of Demeter and Dionysus. The genre featured insulting and obscene language and sometimes it is referred to as "blame poetry". For Alexandrian editors, however, iambus signified any poetry of an informal kind that was intended to entertain, and it seems to have been performed on similar occasions as elegy even though lacking elegy's decorum. The Archaic Greek poets Archilochus, Semonides and Hipponax were among the most famous of its early exponents. The Alexandrian poet Callimachus composed "iambic" poems against contemporary scholars, which were collected in an edition of about a thousand lines, of which fragments of thirteen poems survive. He in turn influenced Roman poets such as Catullus, who composed satirical epigrams that popularized Hipponax's choliamb. Horace's Epodes on the other hand were mainly imitations of Archilochus and, as with the Greek poet, his invectives took the forms both of private revenge and denunciation of social offenders.
The Browne Medals are gold medals which since 1774 have been awarded for annual competitions in Latin and Greek poetry at Cambridge University.
Thomas Newcomb (1682?–1765) was an English clergyman and teacher, known as a poet. He was pro-government writer of the ascendance of Robert Walpole, associated to Walpole through the interest of his patron Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle.
James Michie (1927–2007) was a British poet and translator of Latin poets, including The Odes of Horace, The Poems of Catullus, and The Epigrams of Martial. He was director of the Bodley Head Ltd., a British publishing company, and lecturer at London University. His Collected Poems won the 1995 Hawthornden Prize.
