A Sense of an Ending: Closure in Horace’s Ars poetica (453–76)

The closure of Horace’s Ars poetica – a central poem of the Augustan age and an important contribution to the canon of world literature in general –, has received surprisingly little scholarly attention until very recently. In this article, I will first ask what precisely happens in the final passage of the Ars poetica (lines 453–76); I will then seek to interpret the passage in its function as the ending of the poem; and finally, it will be necessary to discuss how this ending contributes to the overall meaning of the work