Henry Rushton Fairclough his alma mater. Fairclough was also a guest professor for Latin and Greek at Harvard University, and simultaneously president of the American Philological Association; as which he held an official speech titled "The Classics and our Twentieth-century Poets", which was printed in the following year. In 1927, Fairclough retired from Stanford University, but still taught as a guest professor at Amherst College until 1929. Fairclough's research was focused on Roman poets. He wrote translations and bilingual editions of Plautus and Terence, the works of Vergil, and the satires and epistles of Horace. Further, he published text critical and exegetical individual
Horace borrowed from Archaic Greece, employing hexameters in his "Satires" and "Epistles", and iambs in his "Epodes", all of which were relatively easy to adapt into Latin forms. His "Odes" featured more complex measures, including alcaics and sapphics, which were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax. Despite these traditional metres, he presented himself as a partisan in the development of a new and sophisticated style. He was influenced in particular by Hellenistic aesthetics of brevity, elegance and polish, as modeled in the work of Callimachus. In modern literary theory, a distinction is often made between immediate personal experience