Ars Poetica (Epistle to the Pisos)

A verse letter addressed to a Roman family, the Pisos, laying out principles of poetic composition, chiefly for drama, that became one of the most influential works of literary criticism to survive from antiquity, rivaled among ancient sources only by Aristotle's Poetics, and the dominant one for the European tradition through the mid-sixteenth century. Horace argues for organic unity, rejecting works stitched together from incompatible parts, decorum matching style to genre and social station, and above all patient revision, insisting a poem be set aside for years before publication. Rediscovered and intensively studied during the Renaissance, the letter's prescriptions shaped European neoclassical dramatic theory for centuries after Horace's own more casual, occasional intent had been largely forgotten.