Ode, << ohd, >> is a poem of moderate length that usually expresses exalted praise. Greek dramatists wrote choral odes that had three parts. Two parts, a strophe and an antistrophe, had identical meter. The third part, called an epode, had a contrasting meter. Pindar, of ancient Greece, wrote odes in praise of athletic heroes. He used the strophic form, which came to be called Pindaric (see Pindar). Horace, of ancient Rome, wrote odes made up of uniform stanzas, called stanzaic form.
English poetry, from the time of Ben Jonson in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s, included a variety of Pindaric odes, stanzaic odes, and irregular odes, or those with no particular stanza structure. John Dryden wrote two irregular odes in praise of St. Cecilia (1687, 1697). “Ode to Evening” (1747), by William Collins, is a notable stanzaic ode. The great irregular and stanzaic odes of the 1800’s include William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (1852).
Loading the player...Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
See also Greek literature (Lyric poetry).
