Asclepiad (poetry)

Asclepiads were used in Latin by Horace in thirty-four of his odes, as well as by Catullus in Poem 30, and Seneca in six tragedies.

[3] Asclepiads are found either in stichic form (i.e. used continuously unmixed with other metres) or in 4-line stanzas mixed with glyconics and pherecrateans.

The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 used by Klingner (1939), Nisbet & Hubbard (1970), D. West (1995), Shackleton Bailey (2008), Mayer (2012), and Becker (2016), (followed here) are called 1, 4, 5, 3, 2 by Wickham (1896) and Raven (1965), and 1, 3, 4, 2, 5 by Page (1895), Bennett (1914) and Rudd (2004).

1.18 opens as follows: In surviving Greek poetry this form is found in Alcaeus (e.g. 340–9), Callimachus (frag.

[15] It is also found in W. H. Auden's "In Due Season", which begins: Springtime, Summer and Fall: days to behold a world Antecedent to our knowing, where flowers think Theirs concretely in scent-colors and beasts, the same Age all over, pursue dumb horizontal lives.