Ode, Fragment, and Epic Flashcards
aeidein
“to sing,” “to chant”
etym. ode
ode
the term for the most formal, ceremonious, and complexly organized form of *lyric poetry, usually of considerable length. It is frequently the vehicle for public utterance on state occasions, e.g., a ruler’s birthday, accession, or funeral, or the dedication of some imposing public monument
contemporary ode
The ode as it has evolved in contemp. lits. generally shows a dual inheritance
from cl. sources, variously combining the measured, recurrent stanza of the Horatian ode, with its attendant balance of *tone and sentiment (sometimes amounting to a controlled ambiguity, as in Andrew Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” on Oliver Cromwell), and the regular or irregular stanzaic triad of Pindar, with its elevated, vertiginously changeable tone (as in William Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character”), in interesting manifestations as late as Robert Bridges and Paul Claudel.
Both forms have frequently been used for poems celebrating public events, but both have just as frequently eschewed such events, sometimes pointedly, in favor of private occasions of crisis or joy.
The serious tone of the ode calls for the use of a heightened diction and enrichment by poetic device, but this lays it open, more readily than any other lyric form, to burlesque.
the odes of Pindar (ca. 522-443 bce
designed for choric song and dance (see melic poetry ). The words, the sole surviving element of the integral experience, reflect the demands of the other two arts.
A *strophe, a complex metrical structure whose length and pattern of heterometrical lines vary from one ode to another, reflects a dance pattern, which is then repeated exactly in an *antistrophe (the dancers repeating the steps but in the opposite direction), the pattern being closed by an *epode, or third section, of differing length and structure.
Th e ode as a whole (surviving
examples range from fragments to nearly 300 lines) is built up by exact metrical repetition of the original triadic pattern. These odes, written for performance in a Dionysiac theater or perhaps in the Agora to celebrate
athletic victories, frequently appear incoherent in their brilliance of imagery, abrupt shifts in subject matter, and apparent disorder of form within the individual sections. But mod. crit. has answered such objections, which date from the time of Pindar himself, by discerning dominating images, emotional relationships between subjects, and complex metrical organization. The tone of the odes is emotional, exalted, and intense;
the subject matter, whatever divine myths can be adduced to the occasion.
Apart from Pindar, another pervasive source of the mod. ode in Gr. lit. is the cult *hymn, which derived from the Homeric Hymns and flourished during the Alexandrian period in the work of Callimachus and others. Th is sort of poem is notable not for its form but for its structure of argument: an invocation of a deity (later of a personified natural or psychological entity), followed by a narrative genealogy establishing the antiquity and authenticity of the deity, followed by a petition for some special favor, and concluding with a vow of future service.
A complete mod. instance of this structure is John Keats’s “Ode to Psyche.”
Yet another source of the mod. ode’s structure of prayerful petition is the Psalms and other poems of the Heb.
Bible (see hebrew poetry, psalm ), which increasingly influenced Eng. poetry by way of John Milton, the crit. of John Dennis, the original and translated hymns of Isaac Watts, and Robert Lowth’s De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews , ; see hebrew prosody and poetics )
Latin odes
In Lat. lit., the characteristic ode is associated with Horace, who derived his forms not from Pindar but from less elaborate Gr. lyrics, through Alcaeus and Sappho. The Horatian ode is tranquil rather than intense, contemplative rather than brilliant, and intended for the reader in private rather than for the
spectator in the theater. Horace also wrote commissioned odes, most notably the “Carmen saeculare” for Augustus, all of which more closely approximated the
Pindaric form and voice; but his influence on mod. poetry is felt more directly in the trad. of what might be called the sustained *epigram, esp. in the period between Ben Jonson and Matthew Prior. Among the Eng. poets of note, only Mark Akenside habitually
wrote odes in the Horatian vein, but in the 17th c. poets as diverse as Robert Herrick, Thomas Randolph, and—most important among them—Marvell with his Cromwell ode wrote urbane Horatians
anacreontic ode
3rd form of modern ode, descended from the 16th-c. discovery of a group of
some poems, all credited to Anacreon, although the Gr. originals now appear to span a full thousand years.
In general, the lines are short and, in comparison with the Pindaric ode, the forms simple, the subjects being love or drinking, as in the 18th-c. song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” whose tune was appropriated for “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Throughout Europe, the hist. of the ode commences with the rediscovery of the classic forms.
The humanistic ode of the 15th and earlier 16th c. shows the adaptation of old meters to new subjects by Francesco
Filelfo, in both Gr. and Lat., and by Giannantonio Campano, Giovanni Pontano, and Marcantonio
Flaminio in Neo-Lat.
Th e example of the humanistic
ode and the publication in 1513 of the Aldine edition of Pindar were the strongest infl uences on the vernacular
ode in Italy; tentative Pindaric experiments were made by Giangiorgio Trissino, Luigi Alamanni, and Antonio Minturno but without establishing the ode as a new genre.
More successful were the attempts in France by members of the * Pléiade : after minor trials of the new form by others, Pierre de Ronsard in 1550 published The First Four Books of the Odes, stylistic imitations of Horace, Anacreon, and (in the first book) Pindar.
Influenced by Ronsard, Bernardo Tasso and Gabriello Chiabrera later in the century succeeded in popularizing the form in Italy, where it has been used successfully by, among others, Alessandro Manzoni, Giacomo Leopardi (in his Di canzone , 1824), Giosuè Carducci ( Odi barbare , 1824), and Gabriele D’Annunzio ( Odi
navale , 1877).
Th e few attempts at domesticating the ode in 16thc. England were largely unsuccessful, although there
is probably some influence of the cl. ode on Edmund Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes, Prothalamion, and Epithalamion
in 1629
appeared the fi rst great imitation of
Pindar in Eng., Jonson’s “Ode on the Death of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison,” with the strophe, antistrophe, and epode of the cl. model indicated by
the Eng. terms “turn,” “counter-turn,” and “stand.” In the same year, Milton began the composition of his
great ode, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” in regular stanzaic form. Th e genre, however, attained great popularity in Eng. only with the publication of Abraham Cowley’s Pindarique Odes in 1656, in which
he attempted, like Ronsard and Weckherlin before him, to make available to his own lang. the spirit
and tone of Pindar rather than to furnish an exact transcription of his manner.
Cowley was uncertain
whether Pindar’s odes were regular, and the matter was not settled until 1706, when the playwright William Congreve published with an ode of his own a “Discourse” showing that they were indeed regular
With John Dryden begin the great formal
odes of the 18th c.: first the “Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew” and then, marking the reunion of formal verse and music, the “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” and “Alexander’s Feast.” St. Cecilia’s Day odes by many authors had long been written, but the trad.
ended with “Alexander’s Feast.”
For the 18th cen. , the ode was the perfect means of expressing the *sublime
Using *personifi cation and other devices of *allegory, Thomas Gray and William Collins in the mid-18th c.
marshal emotions ranging from anxiety to terror in the service of their central theme, the “progress of poetry,”
making the ode a crisis poem that refl ects the rivalry of mod. lyric with the great poets and genres of the past.
The romantic ode in Eng. lit. is a poem written on the occasion of a vocational or existential crisis in order to reassert the power and range of the poet’s voice.
It is the romantic ode that best suits the remark of Susan Stewart that “[o]des give birth to poets.”
The Eng. romantic ode begins with S. T. Coleridge’s “Dejection:
An Ode” (1802) and William Wordsworth’s pseudoPindaric “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1804,
pub. 1807).
Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode, with
its varied line lengths, complex rhyme scheme, and stanzas of varying length and pattern, has been called the greatest Eng. Pindaric ode. Of the other major
romantic poets, P. B. Shelley wrote the “Ode to the West Wind” and Keats the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,
“Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn,” arguably the finest odes in the lang.
These odes were written in regular stanzas derived not from Horace but from Keats’s own experiments with the *sonnet form. Since the romantic period, with the exception of a few brilliant but isolated examples, the ode has been neither a popular nor a really successful genre in Eng. Among mod. poets, the personal ode in the Horatian manner has been revived with some success, notably by Allen Tate (“Ode to the Confederate Dead”) and W. H. Auden (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “In Praise of Limestone”).
