Literature
Epode
An epode is a form of lyric poetry that originated in ancient Greek literature. It typically consists of a strophe followed by an antistrophe and then a concluding epode. The epode often serves as a contrast to the preceding strophes and antistrophes, providing a different perspective or tone within the poem.
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Lyrical Ballads (1798). Robert Langbaum stresses the dramatic quality of the classical lyric, and argues that it is not to be understood as purely objective; such ‘objectivity’ would make it indistinguishable from epic. In the work of Sappho, Pindar, Catullus or Horace, the poet–speaker ‘talks, as in conversation, either about himself or about someone or something else; and he talks … either to himself or to someone or something else’ (Langbaum 1957:46–47).Greek lyric is thus not the poetry of ‘pure’ feeling or experience, since it depends upon a rhetorical performance and a structure of address; what mattered in Greek lyric ‘was not the need to express something, but the desire, the choice, to conduct lyrical discourse’ (Johnson 1982:72). Yet in Aristotle’s definition of the lyric in Poetics, which has become the dominant model for the modern period, the stress is placed on expression. For Aristotle, all poetry is a species of imitation, a staging of character in action. Lyric is a relatively minor component of tragedy and epic poetry, but its poetic quality lies in the capacity to reveal in exemplary fashion how a character behaves in a given situation. Walker terms the Aristotelian form of lyric a mini-drama, a scene or crucial moment ‘abstracted from an implied enclosing story’ (Walker 1989:13), and it is this model that has become predominant in accounts of the scope and purpose of lyric practice. Lyric comes to describe a short poem that is neither narrative nor discursive, as in the epideictic mode. It is an utterance that is curiously ‘outside’ of time rather than tied to a specific occasion, an interlude in the main narrative, a self-expressive declaration directed towards an absent or imaginary presence rather than to a reader or listener. This paradigm of the non-discursive lyric has acquired critical supremacy, even if Pindar has been described by Harold Bloom as ‘the truest paradigm for western lyric’ (Bloom 1979:17). In Walker’s account, the privileging of interiority and introspection in Aristotle’s rewriting of Pindaric lyric anticipates Romantic and post-Romantic conceptions of lyric, as we shall see in Chapter 4
eBook - PDFClassics in Translation, Volume I
Greek Literature
- Paul L. MacKendrick, Herbert M. Howe, Paul L. MacKendrick, Herbert M. Howe(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- University of Wisconsin Press(Publisher)
LYRIC POETRY cr ranslated by Warren R. Castle and L. R. Lind INTRODUCTION To THE Greeks the word lyric designated only that poetry which was sung to the accompaniment of the IYTe; they had no general term to designate that vast body of poetry which was neither epic nor dramatic. We use the word lyric to fill this deficiency, meaning by it to describe all personal utterance which, by and large, expresses the emotional response of the individual to his own world. Such poetry assumed two forms, monodic and choral. In the former, the poet spoke of and for himself; in the latter he spoke for the group with which he identified himself. The roots of lyric poetry go deep into the remotest past. Homer mentions hymns and cbants connected with religious ceremonies. There were wedding chants, funeral dirges, and paeans of thanksgiving, as well as rustic chants of various kinds, all of which were wholly popular in nature. True poets were interested only in the epic which sang the glories of an ideal heroic past. Some- time in the eighth century, however, when epic poetry more or less died out, poets turned to the contemporary world as a subject for art, and lYTic poetry began to come to full splendor. This shift from the epic to the lYTic was a reflection of the transformation which was taking place in the so- cial structure of the time. Patriarchal kingdoms in which the individual was suhmerged gave way to tYTannies, revolutions, and the first experiments in democracy. Civic patriotism and interest in politics deepened. Fur· ther, it was an age of exploration, colonization, and commercial exploitation. In the midst of this widening experience and political upheaval, the individual sought to find himself and define his relation to the rapidly shifting social organization.
eBook - PDF- Laura Swift(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
The reader may be relieved to know at this stage that, despite the nuances just suggested, there is no practical difficulty in distinguishing an epic poem from a lyric poem. The relationship bet- ween these modes of composition, nonetheless, has long been a matter for discussion. Scholarship once divided early Greek literary history into temporally discrete periods, with epic preceding lyric, so that the latter was seen as solely derivative and reactive. Not only did this tend to reduce our conception of epic to the dominant extant examples (sometimes not even that) in order to make comparisons seem more stark, 3 but now we recognize the continuities and evolution of both “types” before and after the archaic period: the poems of the “Epic Cycle,” for instance, were being composed and performed well after the Iliad and the Odyssey, and found a lively reception in visual and poetic discourse, 4 while, for example, the elegiac couplet is clearly already of some antiquity before we first encounter it in the poetry of Archilochus in the seventh century. Both genres are thereby freed from a teleological straitjacket: lyric poets need not simply be react- ing to an epic model, epic poets other than Homer (and Hesiod) become more visible to the 2 See esp. Hooker 1977 and Bowie 1981 on the traditionality of the Lesbian poetic language; and de Kreij (Chapter 10) in this volume. 3 For the variety of epic poems, forms, and approaches to be found in early Greek epos, see Gainsford 2016. 4 See now Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015, with much further bibliography. 36 Adrian Kelly literary historian even as they encapsulate and modify elements within the lyric traditions, and we become alive to a mutually enriching process at the heart of literary history in the Archaic period.
eBook - PDF- Julian Wolfreys(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
There are at least three main kinds of lyric that have their own subset of guidelines: the ode , the elegy and the sonnet. Lyrics may also simply be called songs or ballads , but here the definition is looser . The dramatic monologue involves us in detective critical work, whereby we eventually come to judge the character speaking as well as her/his situation. The ode Odes are usually addressed to an object or quality, such as to Autumn ( John Keats) or Evening (William Collins). They explore its qualities or what it means to the poet; typically, they start with the description of conventional 2 2 178 literature modules associations and then progress to more individual connotations. Take one example: William Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening’ (1746, rev. 1748; see Ferguson 2005.). Collins starts by evoking the stillness of evening: ‘Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, / With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing’ (ll. 9–10). The passage of the bat is rendered by the sound as well as signified by the words. It is an exercise in pausing and in trying to capture that moment of change before night fully falls: sunset with its ‘bright-haired sun’ (l. 5 – the streaks of its faltering rays resembling strands of hair), and the appearance is noted of the ‘folding-star’ (l. 21 – the evening star that warns shepherds to drive their flocks to their pens for the night). There is a ‘turn’ in the poem, though, at line 33, for it is there that the poet imagines other, more forbidding, evenings, when he may have to take shelter from ‘blustering winds, or driving rain’ (l. 33). From this hut, his vantage point throughout the seasons, he takes stock of the change in seasons, and perhaps his own change in fortune, and finds a necessary coherence, embracing ‘Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipped Health’ (l. 50). Further lucid demonstrations can be found in Jump (1974).
eBook - ePubHomer
The Poetry of the Past
- Andrew Ford(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cornell University Press(Publisher)
Poetics 4.1448b4–27, where imitation arises “naturally” in children, and poetry evolves from “improvisations” to invective or hymns and encomia, according to the character of the singer.38 Thalmann (1984) xiii.39 Alcman 14.2 Page (melos), 39.1 (epê ... kai melos); cf. Plato, Republic 398D.40 This broad use of the plural of epos for unsung poetry (and not only hexametric poetry) seems to have persisted into the classical period, for Herodotus 5.113.2; Xenophon Mem. 2.2.21; and Plato Meno 95D can use epea for elegiacs. This class of poems was the basis of the term “rhapsody.” See Ford (1988). Koller’s study of epea (1972) unnecessarily restricts the word to hexameters.41 Cf. Martin (1984), who also shows how parainetic poetry could be incorporated into the Homeric poems as a separate “genre of discourse” used by certain characters in certain situations.42 For the addressee in wisdom literature (cf. Theognis’s Cyrnus), see West (1978) 33–40. The proem of the Works and Days is also the reverse of that in epos, proceeding from an invocation (1–2) to “I
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