ABSTRACT
The first Englishman to claim to have written a Pindaric ode was apparently a poetaster named John Soothern in a volume published in 1584. Pindar aroused very little interest in England during the sixteenth century, despite the fact that contemporary Continental interest was lively enough to call for the publication of a whole series of printed editions. In the middle of that century Abraham Cowley tried to reproduce Pindar’s spirit and manner without imitating his metrical and stanzaic forms. Abraham Cowley’s understanding of Pindar’s metre was certainly limited- Indeed, no one in modern times understood it correctly until the nineteenth century. But his refraining from imitating the triadic form was undoubtedly deliberate. In 1685 John Dryden noted the spread of the irregular Pindaric ode. He ascribed this to its ‘seeming easiness’ but held that hardly anyone apart from Cowley had yet handled it with success.
