Definition and Examples of Ode – Literary terms

 

Tags: ode definition, Ode example, what is ode, Types of ode

Definition and Examples of Ode – Literary terms

Ode:

A long and elaborate LYRIC poem, usually dignified or exalted in TONE and often written to praise someone or something or to mark an important occasion. The Greek poet Pindar developed the FORM of the ode from the varying STANZA pattern of the choral songs in Greek TRAGEDY. Pindar's odes were written in honor of the winners of the Olympic Games and for other public occasions. The Latin odes of Horace were private, personal expressions are written in regular stanza form.

The seventeenth-century English poet Abraham Cowley developed the free, or irregular, ode, influencing John Dryden, who wrote the finest odes in English, among them "Song for St. Cecelia's Day" and "Alexander's Feast.” Other well-known odes include John Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,'' William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind," and several great odes by John Keats: "On a Grecian Urn," "To a Nightingale," "To Autumn," and "On Melancholy.” Among odes written in the twentieth century are two particularly fine ones: W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" and Allen Tate's “Ode to the Confederate Dead."

See also:

 LYRIC. 

Tags: ode definition, Ode example, what is an ode, Types of ode