Addison, Horace, and The Flood

Abstract: Joseph Addison's neo-Latin poem in praise of Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth describes the primordial deluge by which the surface of the earth was reshaped. The poem refashions language and metre drawn from Horace's Odes in order to accentuate the exorbitant nature of the phenomena it describes. Its distinctively lyric features—apostrophe, present tenses, metre—draw readers into an imaginative involvement with its subject. Readers are thereby enabled to experience their own temporality being informed by the temporal processes that the poem describes. My reading explores the ecocritical possibilities of this experience.