Critics have long recognized that the Elizabethan minor epic or 'erotic epyllion', dealing largely with mythological love affairs and including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, form a coherent generic cluster and testify to an intense albeit apparently rather short-lived literary vogue. This chapter argues that the general critical determination to understand these poems as Ovidian has ignored that their distinctive style is quite unlike that of Ovid. It locates these poems instead within a wider category of medium-length mythological narrative verse in both Latin and English, unified by asensuous and ecphrastic style as well as shared features, including stock characters (such as Venus, Proserpina and Glaucus) and set pieces (such as the ‘Garden of Venus’ motif). Latin examples precede the first English instances, and, where studied at all, have been variously described as epyllia and epithalamia, but have almost never been discussed in relation to the English genre. The chapter argues that the Elizabethan English epyllion of the 1590s functioned as a proxy for formal epithalamia, which, due to the Queen's age and lack of an heir, largely disappeared in England in this decade.

This chapter turns to a third influential facet of the Horatian lyric tradition: the development in English literary culture of the major political ode. Unlike moralizing lyric or psalm paraphrase, this form, of which the most famous early modern example is Andrew Marvell’s 1650 ‘Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, made a relatively late appearance in English poetry, with only scattered and marginally canonical examples (such as those by Jonson, Drayton and Fanshawe) prior to Marvell.

This chapter therefore seeks to answer two related questions. What are the defining features of the political ode in early modern England, taking into account the full panoply of the Latin (and, for these purposes, primarily neo-Latin) tradition? And how different do the landmarks of English achievement in this form – including poems by Jonson and Drayton as well as Marvell and Cowley – appear if read within the Latin literary context from which they emerged? It identifies several phases in the maturing of the formal panegyric ode as written in England in the latter sixteenth century before the form entered the vernacular.