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Horace (65 BC – 8 BC) was a Roman lyrical poet of satire and historical/pastoral odes. Son of a freedman, eventually he became close friends with Virgil. His famous Ars poetica has been an abc of poetry practice and criticism. He was given a farm near Tivoli, and there he wrote his pastoral and other poems. His main works are his Satires, Odes, Epodes, and Epistles. His Ars suggests that a poet should read widely, and be precise and plain in thought and speech. His influence has been enormous on Pope, Ben Jonson, Auden, and Frost.

Willis Barnstone was born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, the Sorbonne, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Columbia and Yale, taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949 – 1951), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution he went to China, where he was later a Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984 – 1985). A former O’Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University.

William Baer, a recent Guggenheim fellow, is the author of sixteen books including Selected Sonnets: Luís de Camões (University of Chicago Press, 2005). A former Fulbright Professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, his translations from the Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian have been published in The London Review, New Letters, Atlanta Review, First Things, Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, Modern Poetry in Translation, and other periodicals.

François Villon (1431 – c. 1463) was born François Montcorbier. A promising graduate of the University of Paris, adept in law and the classics, he fled to the countryside in 1455 after killing a priest in a brawl. For the rest of his life he was a violent vagabond, a thief, and arguably the finest lyric poet in French literature. Between imprisonments, in extreme poverty, he produced volumes of poems, including The Testament. When his death sentence in Paris was commuted to a ten-year banishment, he left the city and was never heard from again.

Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 1855) was one of several pseudonyms used by Gérard Labrunie, who translated Goethe’s Faust at age 19 and continued to import German Romanticism into French while also reverting to Renaissance poets for sonnet forms. A theater critic, travel writer and prose stylist, he is also ranked, on the basis of a dozen evocative sonnets, as one of the finest French poets. Subject to repeated schizophrenic breakdowns, he died at 47.

Armand Sully Prudhomme (1839 – 1907) was a student of law and philosophy who worked for years in the office of a Parisian notary after vision problems prevented a career in engineering. His writing efforts, encouraged by Leconte de Lisle, extended the Parnassian style, which objected to both Symbolism and free verse and hoped to restore the classical standards of elegance, calm and impersonality. Despite the small quantity of his verse and essays, Prudhomme was awarded the first Nobel Prize for literature, in 1901.