Date:         Tue, 24 Mar 1998 22:48:10 EST
From: "nose in the books..." <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Subject:      Re: [WRITERS] Tech: ode definition question

On Tue, 24 Mar 1998 11:32:44 PST, susannah <meresu2c@TCSN.NET>
queried:
:)
:) Hi again everyone!
:) If someone can define Ode for me, I will write An Ode to Bullshit
:) and Hogwash just for the list.
:) Susannah.

According to Literary Terms: A Dictionary by Karl Beckson and Arthur
Ganz, p. 184...

"ode: In English, a lyric poem of some lenght, serious in subject and
dignified in style.  The term, now loosely used, has lost any
necessary reference to the odes of the Greek poet Pindar, to whom the
form is usually traced.  Originally an ode was a choral song to be
sung and danced at a public occasion, such as the celebration of a
victory in the Olympic games.  The stanzas were arranged in groups of
three.  The strophe was sung while the chorus moved in one direction,
the antistrophe, which had the same metrical form, while it moved in
another, and the epode, which had a different form, as it stood
still.  Pindaric odes in English are rare; an example is Thomas Gray's
'The Progress of Poesy.'"
        "An ode in which the stanzas, or verse paragraphs, are
irregular in rhyme scheme and in the number and length of the lines is
called a 'Cowleyan' or 'irregular' ode. ... Examples are ...
Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," ... The Horatian
ode, so called from the Roman poet Horace, is one in which each stanza
follows the same metrical pattern. ... Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale.'
<much clipped>"

So there you go, you can do a Pindaric ode (strophe, antistrophe, and
epode), a Cowleyan ode, or a Horatian ode.

and all in honor of Bullshit and Hogwash?

(does this have something to do with the muddy feet of the gods again?
I swear I'm going to get them a welcome mat and teach them how to wipe
their feet before they come in here...)

tink