Ode
An ode is a long lyric poem characterized by the poet's heightened emotions at moments of deep insight. Typically, odes celebrate or praise a specific object, person (whether real or mythic), virtue, or natural phenomenon, creating a serious and dignified tone. Unlike more interactive poetic forms, odes maintain a straightforward approach, often using the occasion for the poem as part of the title and focusing on a singular grand theme. Originating in ancient Greece, odes were performed in theatrical settings, often with musical accompaniment and used for public rituals celebrating significant events or figures. The Pindaric ode, named after the Greek poet Pindar, features sections that include the strophe, antistrophe, and epode, each recited by a chorus in distinct formations.
The form evolved through Roman poets like Horace and Catullus, who maintained the emotional depth while standardizing the structure. The British neoclassicists later revived the form as a means of conveying wisdom and reflection on public events. In the modern era, particularly during the Romantic period, poets such as Wordsworth and Keats infused odes with personal and emotional themes, often reflecting on nature or introspective experiences. Despite shifts in style and subject matter, from the ordinary to the profound, the ode remains a resilient and esteemed form in poetry, continuing to resonate with contemporary writers.
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Ode
An ode is a long lyric poem that draws on the poet’s heightened emotions at particular moments of special insight. Odes center on the celebration or praise of a certain object, abstract virtue, person (real or mythic), or natural phenomenon. They are serious and dignified, with their tones, subjects, styles, and themes possessing a distinguishing gravitas. Unlike other genres of poetry that often invite reader interactivity and offer multiple themes and suggestive symbols with which to work, odes are far more straightforward in their treatment of their subject, often using the occasion for the poem as the title and drawing a single grand theme from the experience.
Background
The earliest odes date to ancient Greece, where they were part of outdoor theatrical performances that often included dance and musical accompaniment to support the recitation. They were also used as interludes, often providing commentary, in both tragedies and comedies. Odes were often commissioned to be an element in a public religious ritual praising the favor of the gods or in a staged event commemorating a great military victory or the death of a great ruler.
Although historians have found fragmentary evidence of many odes by many different writers of this period, those by Pindar (ca. 518–ca. 438 BCE) have served as exemplars of the style. The Pindaric ode is divided into two or three complementary sections, each three stanzas long—comprising the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode—which were recited by a chorus and each choreographed to a different formation. The chorus would process around the perimeter of the theater space reciting the strophe, which introduced the topic and raised profound questions about it, and then process around the other side of the theater, answering the questions or echoing their concerns in the antistrophe. Then, facing the audience, they would recite the epode, which had a different meter and length and provided a kind of summary reflection or final prayer.
In addition to Pindar’s odes, works by Anacreon (582–485 BCE), Alcaeus (ca. 620–ca. 580 BCE), and Sappho (ca. 630 or 612–ca. 570 or 555 BCE) are among those that have survived. Sappho is considered among the most ambitious practitioners of the ode; her sixth-century “Ode to Aphrodite” records the lamentations of an unrequited lover beseeching the goddess Aphrodite to descend to the earth to console her (strophe), the narrator imagining the meeting (antistrophe), and the goddess promising that the narrator will be pursued by her reluctant lover (epode). At seven stanzas, “Ode to Aphrodite” is the longest extant example of Sappho’s poetic work and is estimated to have been twelve thousand lines long when complete.
The Roman ode, debuting in the first century CE and largely the creation of Horace (65–8 BCE) and Catullus (ca. 84–54 BCE), sought to maintain the emotional investment of the classic ode while working to standardize the form, making it symmetrical. The stanzas took on a tight, regular meter and length, usually in the form of quatrains. The subjects were still august events or meditations on grand themes, triggered by encounters with specific objects that in turn led to an insight into death, the gods, love, nature, or art itself.
British neoclassicists reintroduced the ode form more than a millennium after the fall of Rome, an outgrowth of the fascination, even reverence, that they held for Roman culture and literature. Among the foremost practitioners during this time were John Milton (1608–74), John Dryden (1631–1700), Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), and Alexander Pope (1688–1744). For most of the eighteenth century, the ode was used as a kind of instructional tool, a chance for the poet to share wisdom and insight using strict rhythm and rhyming schemes, the sound and sense of the poem inspiring right behavior and common sense. Odes became occasional verse, in which the poet used great public events or holidays to distill wisdom from such moments. Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629) is often cited as the earliest example of this generation of odes. In it, Milton not only describes the nativity with rich detail and elevated language but also thematically ties the birth of Christ to the ultimate sacrifice on Calvary, creating a somber Christmas celebration that never lets the Christian believer forget that the incarnation must include the passion and death of Christ. Pope’s “Ode to Solitude” (1700), written when he was just twelve years old, is a contemplation on humble peasant life and the poet’s wish that such simple contentment might be his. Indeed, during the neoclassical period, the ode became something of an essay in meter, a chance for the poet to contemplate a variety of abstracts: music, virtue, education, pleasure, passion, even poetry itself.
The Ode Today
The modern ode began with rise of the British romantics in the early nineteenth century, including William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), and John Keats (1795–1821), among others. Odes, given their investment in the emotional life of the poet, emerged as a dominant expression for romantics, although the subject matter was now largely the private experiences of the poet (dawn, butterflies, flowers, a bird calling, the seasons). Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1820) are classic examples of odes that were more personal, emotional, and intimate, with rhythm and rhyming schemes more individualized, guided not so much by convention as by the poet’s emotional argument. Each ode renders a clear theme: Keats, for instance, uses his contemplation of the figures on an old urn to ponder the immortality of art; Shelley uses the powerful wind of late autumn to suggest the force of poetic inspiration itself; and Wordsworth reflects on the passage of time.
Despite the postmodern trend in the mid-twentieth century to parody traditional poetic forms, the ode has remained largely intact. Modern practitioners, most notably Chile’s Pablo Neruda (1904–73) and England’s W. H. Auden (1907–73), maintain the ode’s serious tone and feeling of being a response to the experience of enormous and consequential emotions, although the meter and rhyme reflect more idiosyncratic styles and the subject matter often appears inconsequential. Neruda, for instance, penned an ode to his socks, and American poet Donald Justice (1925–2004) wrote an ode to a dressmaker’s dummy. Despite such changes, however, the basic ode form has proved to be one of the most enduring in the art of poetry.
Bibliography
Cairns, Francis. Roman Lyric: Collected Papers on Catullus and Horace. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. Print.
Horace. Odes. Ed. and trans. David R. Slavitt. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. Print.
Keats, John. Complete Poems. Ed. Jack Stillinger. 1972. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.
Murray, Christopher John, ed. Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850. 2 vols. New York: Fitzroy, 2004. Print.
Neruda, Pablo. All the Odes: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. Ilan Stavans. New York: Farrar, 2013. Print.
Pelling, Christopher, and Maria Wyke. Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome: Ancient Ideas for Modern Times. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Print.
Pindar. The Complete Odes. Trans. Anthony Verity. Introd. and ed. Stephen Instone. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Sappho. Sappho. Trans. Mary Barnard. Fwd. Dudley Fitts. 1958. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Print.
Wordsworth, Jonathan, and Jessica Wordsworth, eds. The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry. New York: Penguin, 2005. Print.