ABSTRACT
The English ode begins with Ben Jonson and rises in esteem through the period of neo-classicism, culminating in some of the more exalted poems of the Romantics and then surviving in public Victorian verse. In 1629 appeared Jonson’s ‘Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’, a conscious attempt to provide an exact English equivalent for the complicated stanza forms of Pindar; Milton’s ‘On the morning of Christ’s nativity’, written in the same year, though not Pindaric in the same way, exercises an extremely complex metrical pattern. The Horatian model is represented in the ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Milton’s younger contemporary Andrew Marvell. In 1656, Abraham Cowley’s collection Miscellanies made available a number of adaptations as well as imitations of Pindar, and set a fashion for a type of free Pindaric ode which was to become popular with the Augustans. Three odes of Dryden were also influential: two of them, odes for St Cecilia’s Day (1687 and 1697, the second entitled ‘Alexander’s feast’), honoured the patron saint of music and returned to Pindar at the same time, for they were designed to be set to music. William Collins (1721-59) and Thomas
Gray (1716-71) continued the Pindaric fashion; William Cowper (1731-1800) favoured the less spectacular, more quietly serious, Horatian manner.Towards the end of the eighteenth century, burlesques of the ode began to appear, but the genre was taken over by the Romantics and employed in several notable lyric poems on political, emotional and aesthetic themes: Wordsworth’s elaborate ode, ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (1803, published 1807) and the odes of Keats published in 1820 (‘Nightingale’, ‘Psyche’, ‘Grecian Urn’, ‘Autumn’, ‘Melancholy’) are the best-remembered examples in this period, highly philosophical, intense, yet controlled. Coleridge (‘France’, ‘Dejection’) and Shelley (‘West Wind’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Naples’ – the last employing an extraordinarily complicated metrical arrangement with some claims to Greek heritage) also practised the form.
