The Ode

Today we are discussing the ode. An ode is a poem of praise to anything. Here are some of the odes we looked at:


1. Ode for Music
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ode to the West Wind
3. John Keats: To Autumn
4. Henry Timrod: Ode
5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The Fire of Driftwood
6. Hart Crane: from The Bridge
7. Marianne Moore: The Paper Nautilus
8. Judith Wright: Australia 1970
9. Charles Simic: Miracle Glass Co.
10. Howard Nemerov: The Blue Swallows
11. Robert Creeley: America
12. Robert Pinsky: Ode to Meaning
13. Joy Harjo: Perhaps the World Ends Here

From its origins in classical antiquity, the ode was a solemn, heroic, and elevated form. It elevated the person, the object, the occasion. In ancient times, in the Pindaric ode, athletes were praised, statesmen were applauded. Therefore the early examples of the ode are full of flatteries, exaggerations, and claims for the excellence and high standing of the subject.


The ode might have remained a static and historic form, but the Romantic movement galvanized it. Suddenly these poets, struggling with their new and volatile arrangements of the inner and outer world, discovered themselves in this form.


In the nineteenth century, the ode transited from its old heroic mode and became a form that examined and exalted lyric crisis. In this form Keats celebrated the nightingale, the Grecian urn (remember that?) and the darkening weather of Autumn. In this form also, Shelley wrote his powerful "Ode to the West Wind."


But the ode, like the pastoral and elegy, was part of convention, part of mode, and all opportunity. Modern poets have taken the spirit of the ode-- its address, its decorum-- and widened it to include a much more panoramic landscape of reference and celebration.


In the nineteenth century, when Shelley wrote "ode to the West Wind" or Keats" To Autumn," two things are obvious: The ode is no longer a ceremonial form, and the writing of the sonnet has influenced the structure of the ode.  Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind is largely made of sonnets, but Wordsworth's defining "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is irregular, exuberant, shifting from long lines to short, and from epigrammatic to philosophical statements.


For poets in this century, the ode was almost a lost form. Its straight-faced and unswerving elevation for objects and persons no longer seems possible in an age of lost faith and broken images. But, as in Robert Pinsky's dark and witty meditation on its power, the ode still casts a long shadow over the contemporary poet.