This book is a detailed study of a single poem -- Horace, ###Odes 1.9 -- often called 'The Soracte Ode' after the mountain named in its second line. Although more than seventy articles and parts of books have been devoted to this twenty-four line poem since the beginning of the last century, Lowell Edmunds is the first scholar to apply developments in literary theory from outside the field of classics to a discussion of the ode. Specifically, he uses Hans Robert Jauss's essay on Baudelaire's "Spleen (II)" as a model for his study.