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Updated: May 8, 2025
Religion and the state had been the patrons of poetry; on their decline poetry seemed dead. There were no heroic kings, like those for whom epic minstrels had chanted. The cities could no longer welcome an Olympian winner with Pindaric hymns. There was no imperial Athens to fill the theatres with a crowd of citizens and strangers eager to listen to new tragic masterpieces.
To understand the "Pindaric" English ode, we must remember that a few scholars, like Ben Jonson, Congreve and Gray, took peculiar pleasure in reproducing the general effect of the Greek strophic arrangement of "turn," "counterturn" and "pause."
When, therefore, with the Duke's death, came a sudden demand upon his Muse, and that in shape so solemn as to forbid, as the poet conceived, any fanciful license of invention, the Pindaric form seemed inevitable; and that form rendered a fair exhibition of the poet's peculiar genius out of the question.
For Cowley, failing to perceive that Pindar's apparent lawlessness was due to the corruption of the Greek text and to the modern ignorance of the rules of Greek choral music, made his English "Pindaric" odes an outlet for rebellion against all stanzaic law. The finer the poetic frenzy, the freer the lyric pattern!
In short, a modern Pindaric writer compared with Pindar is like a sister among the Camisars compared with Virgil's Sibyl; there is the distortion, grimace, and outward figure, but nothing of that divine impulse which raises the mind above itself, and makes the sounds more than human.
Or, not tying ourselves to Couplets strictly, we may use the benefit of the Pindaric way, practised in the Siege of Rhodes; where the numbers vary, and the rhyme is disposed carelessly, and far from often chiming. "Neither is that other advantage of the Ancients to be despised, of changing the Kind of Verse, when they please, with the change of the Scene, or some new Entrance.
He broke out on liberty, and, indeed, on whatever he pleased, uninterrupted. Rigby sat feeling the vice-treasureship slipping from under him. Nugent was not less pensive Lord Strange, though not interested, did not like it. Everybody was too much taken up with his own concerns, or too much daunted, to give the least disturbance to the Pindaric.
He looks upon them and treats them as a set of low mechanical men, a set of low-born book-keepers, as base souls, who in an account call for explanation and precision. If there is no precision in accounts, there is nothing of worth in them. You see he himself is an eccentric accountant, a Pindaric book-keeper, an arithmetician in the clouds.
However, as I feel nothing in my feet, I flatter myself that this Pindaric transition will not be a regular ode, but a fragment, the more valuable for being imperfect. Now for my Gazette. Marriages Nothing done. Intrigues More in the political than civil way. Births Under par since Lady Berkeley left off breeding. Gaming Low water. Deaths Lord Morton, Lord Wentworth, Duchess Douglas.
If men of letters require a universal language to communicate with one another, Latin is certainly the best, for Greek and Arabic do not adapt themselves in the same way to the genius of modern civilization. Haller was a good poet of the Pindaric kind; he was also an excellent statesman, and had rendered great services to his country.
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