The modern poet who set the pattern for several generations of French and English satirists was Boileau. Horace and Juvenal were his models, and he used them with great ingenuity. The poems themselves are best called ‘‘imitations’’: Boileau would take an idea or situation from Roman satire and develop it in terms of his own contemporary world. For instance, his first and sixth satires (1666) derive directly from Juvenal’s Third Satire. In Boileau’s first, a disgusted poet explains why he is leaving Paris, and in his sixth Boileau describes a day’s adventures in the city - the noise, the mud, the crowds, the danger. Many of the elements are familiar from Juvenal, and some passages are direct translations. But Boileau has made the material his own, adjusting Juvenal’s moral complaints to fit his own time and adding rich (often comic) detail to his picture of contemporary Paris. He has also created a new satiric voice, blending the urbanity of Horace with the direct social criticism of Juvenal. And in his most imaginative poems he totally transforms his source. In the wonderfully ironic argument of Satire IX (1668), Boileau accuses his esprit (wit) of getting him into trouble. In his wit’s reply we hear Horace’s own justifications of satire; but Boileau has added a new charm to the familiar material. Finally, Boileau’s imitations went beyond satire; in his epistles (1670-98), which praise moderation and encourage the search for self-knowledge, an attentive reader will often hear Horace speaking French.
Boileau’s most skillful disciple in this art was Alexander Pope, whose Imitations of Horace (1733-8) offer a brilliant reimagining of Horatian material. Pope chose four satires and five epistles that he rendered into elegant English couplets. In each case he follows Horace’s text - in fact, he had the Latin printed on the pages facing his version - and yet everything is made new. The setting of the poems is modern England, the cast of characters contemporary society. Like Boileau he had created his own persona, an urbane English gentleman-poet. Horace’s reflections are filtered through this new sensibility, his criticisms turned with epigrammatic wit. As a result, everything at the same time is and is not Horace. When Pope’s satire turns political, as in the ‘‘Epilogue to the Satires,’’ the tone sometimes seems more reminiscent of Juvenal than of Horace, but this is not surprising. Like Boileau, Pope creates his own voice, and he can laugh, rail, or sneer at the world depending on the world’s folly or vice.
Samuel Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal’s Third and Tenth Satires also deserve notice. Johnson’s London (1738) captures some of Juvenal’s contempt for the corrupt metropolis, but Johnson’s true genius was for moral reflection rather than biting satire, and it was in Juvenal’s Tenth Satire that he found matter proper for his own temperament. The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) is a deep and powerful reworking of Juvenal’s reflections on human folly. Johnson maintains the basic structure of Juvenal’s poem, with its many examples of misguided desires, but he asserts his own control over the poem’s tone. Gone are the sneering and disgust; in their place are sober reflection and an underlying note of sadness. Johnson does not explicitly bring Christianity into the poem, but his religious faith inflects his handling of the material at many points, especially the conclusion, where he follows closely Juvenal’s Stoic prayer for resignation, yet accommodates it thoroughly to Christian beliefs.
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