The direction of Pope's career as a formal verse satirist is from an essentially Horatian ethic epistle like Burlington (1731), to mingled satire with a variety of Horatian, Juvenalian, and Persian emphases, to the over-whelmingly Juvenalian–Persian elevation and gloom of the Epilogue to the Satires (1738). Both Pope's poems and his contemporaries' reception of them indicate that his career was progressively less, not more, of “an Imitatio Horatii,” and that Horace's “place to stand” was progressively less, not more, attractive for him; it was sapped and then replaced by the conventions of Persius and Juvenal, which Pope himself welcomed.

One may, however, raise certain questions regarding the satiric method I have attributed to Pope. Why did he continue to imitate the satirist he was supposedly rejecting? Should he not have imitated poems of Juvenal and Persius as well? Some answers to these questions are implied in the poems imitated themselves – imitating Donne's Renaissance Horace, for example, is imitating a surrogate Juvenal. There are other answers as well, since in spite of Horace's several inadequacies, he and his special achievements were necessary for Pope's own purposes.

Why Horace?

Pope's imitations of Horace are part of his campaign to refine English verse. Early in his career he adapted the Ovidian epistle and the Virgilian country poem, and as he matured he looked to the third member of that distinguished group to continue his task.