ABSTRACT

In author'spolitical reading of the Ode, David Norbrook refutes the New Critical belief in 'pure literature' and the 'isolated genius' that would transcend historical events through the use of balance and irony. For Norbrook, the poem and the English Civil War were essentially political, occurring during an historical moment when an English republic seemed possible. 'A Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland' has played a central part in twentieth-century discussions of the relationship between poetry and politics. For a brief moment the Ode again seemed about to become timely at the time of the exclusion crisis in the early 1680s, when Marvell's poems were posthumously printed. In an Ode of 1630 Sir Richard Fanshawe celebrated Charles's preservation of the peace while 'warre is the entire world about'. In 1652 Hall published the first English translation of Longinus's late-classical treatise on the sublime. Milton's sonnets of the 1640s and 1650s adapt the Horatian ethos to new political circumstances.