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Updated: May 8, 2025
On the accession of George the Second, Young found the same transcendent merits in him as in his predecessor, and celebrated them in a style of poetry previously unattempted by him—the Pindaric ode, a poetic form which helped him to surpass himself in furious bombast. “Ocean, an Ode: concluding with a Wish,” was the title of this piece.
"To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound: Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!" "Voluntaries," published in the same year in the "Atlantic Monthly," is more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than the plain song of the "Boston Hymn."
Works of a similar tendency in England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747 and 1757; especially Collins's Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands, and Gray's Bard, a Pindaric in which the last survivor of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his guild.
It is to Gray, however, that we must turn for the distinctive character of the best poetry of the eighteenth century. With reluctance we will surrender the Pindaric Odes, though not without risking the observation that some of Wordsworth's own criticism on Gray is as narrow and as much beside the mark as Jeffrey's on the Excursion.
Not long after this Pindaric attempt he published two Epistles to Pope, "Concerning the Authors of the Age," 1730. Of these poems one occasion seems to have been an apprehension lest, from the liveliness of his satires, he should not be deemed sufficiently serious for promotion in the Church. In July, 1730, he was presented by his College to the Rectory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire.
It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once read to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory period of Cowley's preface to his "Pindaric Odes," written in imitation of the style and manner of the odes of Pindar.
Swift began early to think, or to hope, that he was a poet, and wrote Pindaric Odes to Temple, to the king, and to the Athenian Society, a knot of obscure men, who published a periodical pamphlet of answers to questions, sent, or supposed to be sent, by letters.
"To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound: Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!" "Voluntaries," published in the same year in the "Atlantic Monthly," is more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than the plain song of the "Boston Hymn."
The poets were all employed in praising him; and Lebrun, with but little of the Pindaric fire in his soul, composed the following distich, which certainly is not worth much: "Heros, cher a la paix, aux arts, a la victoire Il conquit en deux ans mille siecles de gloire." The two councils were not disposed to be behind the Directory in the manifestation of joy.
Some of his other odes are deformed by the Pindaric folly then prevailing, and are written with such neglect of all metrical rules as is without example among the ancients; but his diction, though perhaps not always exactly pure, has such copiousness and splendour as shows that he was but a very little distance from excellence.
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