Writing exceptionally well …

Horace

“You will have written exceptionally well if,  by the skillful arrangement of your words, you have made an ordinary one seem original”

From Horace (65-8 BC) Ars Poetica.

Written? In Horace’s time? The original text in Latin is:

Dixeris egregie notum si callida verbum reddiderit iunctura novum. The verb is “to say”, not “to write”. This was the age of oratory, studied and practiced as a component of rhetoric – the art of  persuasion, of moving an audience, with language.

William Shakespeare

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Q