"Pulvis et horror", allusion and war

Classic and contemporary in manuscript verse from the English Civil War

Last week I was thinking about Horace, Odes 1.3 and how much it matters (if at all) what a poem was originally “about”. Ezra Pound defined poetry as “news that stays news” and part of what makes any work of art a ‘classic’ — insofar as it is, and for as long as it is, since these things are not set in stone — is that it seems freshly relevant to each ge…