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

This article examines the first sonnet of W. Wordsworth’s River Duddon collection in the light of its relation-ship 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 re-jected 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: Words-worth 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 struc-ture. This contradiction confirms Wordsworth’s paradoxical relationship with the classics, as noted in earlier studies.