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.
5 Key excerpts on "Epode"
eBook - ePub- Guido Mazzoni, Zakiya Hanafi(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Belknap Press(Publisher)
...Without entering into the debate on Catullus’s Liber (whether the collection was put together by him or assembled after his death), it is clear that its structure does not follow the story of a life or a love but, rather, an alternation of meters. Similarly, Horace’s Epodes, Odes, Satires, and Letters, or Ovid’s Amores, Tristia, and Epistulae ex Ponto belong to different genres. When it came to classifying texts, the differences in meter and subject matter counted for more than the identity of the authorial speaker. At the end of the first century CE, in a representative, canonic work such as Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria the architecture of literary forms was still identical to the Alexandrian system. In presenting literary genres to orators, Quintilian names epic, elegiac, and iambic poetry, lyric, satire, comedy, New Comedy, tragedy, history, oratory, and philosophy. He describes them as if they were separate forms, each with its own rules and models. 27 A passage from Tacitus’s Dialogus de oratoribus (A Dialogue on Oratory) is helpful for understanding how the different kinds of short poetry were perceived: For my part I hold all eloquence in its every variety something sacred and venerable, and I regard as preferable to all studies of other arts not merely your tragedian’s buskin or the measures of heroic verse, but even the sweetness of the lyric ode, the lasciviousness of the elegy, the satire of the iambic, the wit of the epigram, and indeed any other form of eloquence. 28 Each kind corresponds to a specific attitude: lyric poetry is sweet, elegies are lascivious because they talk about love, iambic poets are sarcastic, and epigram writers are witty. In the first century CE, the idea that these subgenres might all be part of the same genre appears to be unthinkable. A unified class of lyric poetry was missing from the taxonomies of the philologists and the philosophers...
...The epideictic orator, like the lyric poet, offers ‘paradigms of identity’, assuming a position or role from which to address an audience. Jeffrey Walker (1989) argues that Pindar’s epideictic oratory, particularly in his victory odes, is the typical form of ancient Greek lyric, its rational persuasion elevated by music and patterned prosody, far from the rapturous ‘cry’ suggested by Sedgwick. For example, Horace uses the pronominal form and evokes the ‘ hic et nunc ’ (‘here and now’) of Greek lyric and its tradition of music, performance and address (Johnson 1982:127), in clear contrast to the retrospective ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ that characterises lyric for Wordsworth in his Preface to 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...
eBook - ePub- Katharina Volk(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...As it happens, elegy is a kind of “catch-all” genre in Greek literature that is difficult to tie down to a particular topic, mood, or stylistic level – quite unlike, for example, epic, the high-style genre, written solely in hexameters, that was typically associated with narratives of heroic exploits. In the Archaic and Classical periods (7th–4th C. BCE), elegies were performed, accompanied by the flute, at the drinking parties (symposia) of the aristocracy. Subjects included rousing calls to battle, bitter-sweet reflections on love, and moralizing about the proper conduct expected of an upper-class male. At the same time, the elegiac couplet was used for short inscriptions, especially on gravestones or offerings to the gods. Such funerary or votive texts were called epigrams (Greek epigramma means “inscription”), and “epigram” subsequently became the term for any short poem in elegiacs, no matter whether it was really inscribed somewhere, imitated the inscriptional format as a kind of literary game (e.g., by producing a eulogy of a deceased person that was never in fact put on a gravestone), or made no such pretense and treated other topics entirely. Epigram is thus, as it were, elegy’s little sister, with the demarcation between the two not always entirely clear (there is no fixed number of couplets that an epigram must reach to be considered an elegy). Both elegy and epigram flourished in the Hellenistic period (3rd C. BCE onward). Elegies, including very long ones, were written on a wide variety of topics, with Callimachus’ Aetia (four books on the origins of obscure religious practices) one of the most famous examples. There was also a craze for epigram, which was now a purely literary genre that could be used to treat pretty much any subject...
eBook - ePubThe Book of Forms
A Handbook of Poetics. Fifth Edition.
- Lewis Turco(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- University of New Mexico Press(Publisher)
...Part I The Elements of Poetry Introduction The terms poetry and poesy are often used interchangeably, but the former means that body of literature which is identified as being poems, and the latter means the act of composing poetry. There are three traditional major genres of poetry and any number of minor ones. The major genres of poetry are Dramatic Poetry, which is poetry written in dialogue, Lyric Poetry, or songs; and Narrative Poetry, story poems. These genres will be considered in order following the Form-Finder Index. There have been many poets and critics throughout the ages, in particular during the Romantic period, who have maintained that lyric poetry is the only “pure poetry,” for this genre has no narrative, argumentative, or didactic purpose. The ancient narrative forms, such as epics, romances, and ballads, however, were originally considered to be poems, and they correspond to our modern novel, novella, and short story. For discussions of these genres, see the companion volume of this book, The Book of Literary Terms. Because in most of the European world all poems, whether songs, stories, or plays, were originally composed in the mode called verse, which had mnemonic devices so that it could be committed to memory before there was printing or even writing, popular confusion has resulted since the introduction, during the Renaissance, of the mode called prose as a vehicle for narrative and drama. However, in the earliest Middle Eastern literature, which became the basis for much European literature, the oldest lyrics and narratives were written in prose mode, not verse mode, as in the oldest long narrative poem on record, the Chaldean Epic of Gilgamesh. In the Hebrew Old Testament (the Torah) songs were also written in the prose mode, as for instance The Song of Songs and the Psalms of David; there is even evidence that the earliest known drama may have been The Book of Job in its original version...
eBook - ePub- Aristotle(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Big Cheese Books(Publisher)
...It was late before the Archon granted a comic chorus to a poet; the performers were till then voluntary. Comedy had already taken definite shape when comic poets, distinctively so called, are heard of. Who furnished it with masks, or prologues, or increased the number of actors — these and other similar details remain unknown. As for the plot, it came originally from Sicily; but of Athenian writers Crates was the first who abandoning the ‘iambic’ or lampooning form, generalized his themes and plots. Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of meter and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit, whereas the Epic action has no limits of time. This, then, is a second point of difference; though at first the same freedom was admitted in Tragedy as in Epic poetry. Of their constituent parts some are common to both, some peculiar to Tragedy: whoever, therefore knows what is good or bad Tragedy, knows also about Epic poetry. All the elements of an Epic poem are found in Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the Epic poem. 6 Of the poetry which imitates in hexameter verse, and of Comedy, we will speak hereafter. Let us now discuss Tragedy, resuming its formal definition, as resulting from what has been already said. Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. By ‘language embellished,’ I mean language into which rhythm, ‘harmony’ and song enter...
