Dr. Richard Clarke LITS2002 Notes 03D
1
THE ODE (‘GREATER ROMANTIC LYRIC’)
M. H. Abrams, in a very important essay, coins the term ‘Greater Romantic Lyric’ to describe the
predominant and paradigmatic poetic modality of Romanticism. His definition is applicable to a wide
range of Romantic poems in terms of its focus on the encounter between subject and object at the core
of Romantic poetry: some of the poems, he writes, “are called odes, while the others approach the ode in
having lyric magnitude and a serious subject, feelingfully meditated” (76).
The ode is certainly one of the genres most favoured by the Romantics. Traditionally, the ode is,
according to Bert Bach, a
lyric poem of ceremonious effect which embodies a complex thought or emotion.
Organised by deliberate argument, illustration or presentation, the ode is further
characterised by impressive length, elevated diction, and a serious or elevated tone.
Though frequently an occasional piece--that is, a piece written to honour a particular
event or person . . ., the form often serves as a mode for philosophical reflection. (212)
Indeed, the ode is the form, Bach claims, most ideally suited to the “poetic presentation of a complex
idea or emotion” (217). Sometimes, the reader will deduce this central idea or emotion from its implicit
presentation, while sometimes the poet explicitly states his theme. Often the serious or exalted tone of a
reflective ode is introduced by efficacious use of the periodic sentence (a sentence in which the meaning
and grammatical form are delayed and not completed until the end) and frequent use is made of
elaborate apostrophes and personifications.
The ode as utilised in English and American poetry has evolved from loose imitations of two
classical antecedents: the Greek poet Pindar and the Roman Horace. Pindar’s odes, written for
celebrations of athletic victories, bequeathed to English poetry the triadic (three stanza) form known as
the Pindaric ode. The first stanza (strophe) is identical metrically and in length to the second
(antistrophe) while the third (epode) varies from its two antecedents. Abraham Cowley was the first to
attempt to adapt the spirit of the Pindaric ode to English concerns. His odes, containing no prescriptive
stanzaic pattern or rhyme scheme, allowed the poet to adapt various stanzas to changing thoughts and
emotions. A good example of this kind of ode is Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” On the
other hand, Horace’s odes were characterised by a placid, rather than adulatory, tone and were more
given to private reflection. They bequeathed to English poetry a different form of the ode in which there
are several stanzas all of equal length and identical metre. Different odes employ different types of
stanzas but, once chosen, the form is repeated from stanza to stanza. Stanzaic repetition creates a
certain regularity which readers come to expect and which the poet can vary to achieve different effects.
Abrams describes the characteristic ode-like form and preoccupations of what he terms the
‘Greater Romantic Lyric’:
They present a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually localized, outdoor
setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a fluent vernacular which rises easily to a
more formal speech, a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer
scene, but more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. The speaker
begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the
landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and
feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this
meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a
moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to
end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened
understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation. . . . Romantic writer . .
.dealt with the nonhuman only insofar as it is the occasion for the activity which defines
man thought, the process of intellection. (“Greater Romantic Lyric” 76-7)
In short, the outer scene is not represented for its own sake but only as a stimulus for the poet to engage
in the most characteristic human activity: thinking. Most of the well-known Romantic poems are in fact
“poems of feelingful meditation which, though often stimulated by a natural phenomenon, are concerned
with central human experiences and problems” (128), as Abrams puts it in his Glossary of Literary
Terms.
Dr. Richard Clarke LITS2002 Notes 03D
Recommended Readings:
Abrams, M . H.
The Correspondent Breeze:
Bach, Bert
The Liberating Form
2
“Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric”