2024.68.10

>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2024 (34) 68

“Inspiration’s darling child”: The Romantic Ode

Paul Hamilton

 FULL TEXT   

 ABSTRACT (en)

The ode is usually an explicitly public utterance, but one which revises public expectations of its subject-matter, thus drawing attention to the individual originality of its author. It is simultaneously a highly formalised genre and one fundamentally aspirational in its ambitions. Pindaric, Horatian and Anacreontic models help shape many odes written in the Romantic period, but the aspirational idiom tends to predominate, making the poems frequently about their own license, typically Romantic exercises in poetic reflexivity. My discussion looks at poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Moore, Hölderlin and Leopardi to compare rhetorical tactics by which Romantic odes visibly take on the conflicted task of formally exploring a response to their subject exceeding received expectations. Their pursuit of the exorbitant is here argued to be another example of post-Kantian exploitation of the philosophic legitimacy Kant granted the aesthetic to express what we might feel about things beyond our power to conceptualise them. Poets considered here use odes to envisage freedoms they desire – national, political and personal. In Romantic poetry, though, the realization of these visions becomes conspicuously literary, involving a shift from the subject described to the medium claiming to treat it with such originality. While the ode’s all-encompassing writing furnishes political encouragement, it can also, as in Hölderlin’s case, worryingly produce aesthetic excellence at the expense of personal coherence.

 KEYWORDS (en)

odes, Romanticism, reflexivity, poetry, nationalism, liberty, madness

 DOI

https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2024.68.10

 SOURCES

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: New Left Books, 1977.

Blanchot, Maurice. “Madness par excellence.” In The Blanchot Reader, edited by Michael Holland, 110-28. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Bloom, Harold. “The Internalization of Quest-Romance.” In Romanticism and

Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom, 3-24. New York: Norton, 1970.

Chandler, James. Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Chateaubriand, François-René de. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Edited by Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier. 2 vols. Paris: Édition Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1957.

Cohen, Ralph. “The Return to the Ode.” In The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, edited by John Sitter, 203-24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Poems. Edited by John Beer. London: J.M. Dent, 1993.

Cowley, Abraham. Pindarique Odes, Written in Imitation of the Stile and Manner of Pindar. London: Humphrey Moseley, 1656.

Duff, David. “The Romantic Ode and the Art of Brinkmanship.” Études Anglaises 73, no. 2 (2020): 137-59.

Duff, David. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Haverkamp, Anselm. Leaves of Mourning: Hölderlin’s Late Work, With an Essay on Keats and Melancholy. Translated by Vernon Chadwick. New York: SUNY Press, 1996.

Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Edited by P.P. Howe. 21 vols. London: J.M. Dent, 1930-34.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. Essays and Letters. Translated by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth. London: Penguin, 2009.

Hölderlin, Friedrich. Poems and Fragments. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Hölderlin, Friedrich. Selected Poetry. Translated by David Constantine. Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2013.

Horace. The Odes of Horace. Bilingual Edition. Translated by James Michie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.

Keats, John. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by Jack Stillinger. London: Heinemann, 1978.

Laplanche, Jean. Hölderlin et la question du père. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961.

Leconte de Lisle, Charles-Marie-René. Oeuvres de Leconte de Lisle. Edited by Edgar Pich. 4 vols. Paris: Societé D’Édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1971.

Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Bilingual Edition. Translated by Jonathan Galassi. London: Penguin, 2010.

Lonsdale, Roger, ed. The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith. London: Longman, 1969.

Milton, John. Complete Shorter Poems. Edited by John Carey. London: Longman, 1971.

Moore, Thomas. The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore. Edited by A.C. Godley. London: Oxford University Pess, 1910.

O’Neill, Michael. “Sonnets and Odes.” In The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Michael O’Neill, Anthony Howe sand Madeleine Callaghan, 325-41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Pindar. The Odes of Pindar. Translated by Geoffrey S. Conway. London: J.M. Dent, 1972.

Robinson, Mary. Poetical Works of the Late Mrs Robinson. 3 vols. London: Richard Phillips, 1806.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 3: 1819-1820. Edited by Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest and Michael Rossington. London: Routledge, 2014.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977.

Virgil. The Eclogues. Bilingual text. Translated by Guy Lee. London: Penguin, 1984.

Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth. The Oxford Authors. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.