In this section I will briefly survey the literature on Horatian poetic style,and then offer some detailed translations and analyses of particular poems fromdifferent genres to try to show how Horatian expression works on the page,especially in terms of intertextuality, structural arrangement, and word order.Horace's exceptionally dense and refined poetic texture has beenrecognized as such since antiquity: Ovid (Tristia 4.10.50)refers to Horace's carmina culta(‘cultured poems’), and Petronius (118.5) to hiscuriosa felicitas (‘painstaking felicity ofstyle’), while Quintilian (10.1.96) sees him as uerbisfelicissime audax (‘most felicitously bold inexpression’). All these comments are likely to refer primarily to theOdes, but can be applied in general to Horace'sstyle through different genres. For the basic facts of Horatian diction andsyntax, Bo 1960 remains unrivalled in its sheer level of detail; for more recentoverviews and useful scholarly bibliography on Horatian poetic style see theexcellent Muecke 1997 and the rest of the major section on style of which itforms the chief part in the Enciclopedia oraziana (Mariotti1996–8), the list of publications in the area up to 2006 by Holzberg,and the helpful survey of the development of Horace's style andmetrical practice in Knox 2013. On the metres of the Odes, theintroductory section in Nisbet and Hubbard 1970 remains a reliable guide; forsome more adventurous attempts to relate metre to literary content in Horace seeMorgan 2010. The elaborate and expressive word order of theOdes is the topic of Nisbet 1999. But the best resources forthe analysis of Horatian style and metre are the recent detailed commentaries onHorace's works (listed in Chapter I, section 3), which are closelyused in what follows.