Description
Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450-1700 is the companion volume to the author's earlier study, Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-Ode. Its particular focus is on the development of the political ode in Italy and France in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and its dissemination throughout continental Europe and finally to England in the seventeenth century. It also considers how the funeral and familiar pindaric and the city ode developed as ancillary to the political ode. It includes discussion of odes by early Italian experimenters, Ronsard and his followers, and major English poets ù Milton, Marvell, Cowley, Dryden, Behn, Drayton, Jonson, and Spenser.
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Revard (English and Greek, Southern Illinois University, emerita) examines the rebirth and evolution of the Pindaric ode in Europe, from its adoption by Neoplatonic authors in fifteenth century Italy through its vernacular metamorphosis in both style and function, especially in French and English by the end of the seventeenth century. Revard arranges the topic by the uses made of the ode, starting with praise for rulers, often in the hope of patronage, to the ode-on-demand for all occasions. She offers an in depth analysis of Cowley, who popularized the pindaric in England as well as the use made of it by Behn, Dryden and Milton. Ronsard is the main example of the French pindaric. The often political subtext of the poems is analyzed along with the way this developed as the odes began to be composed for more private occasions. In her epilogue, Revard notes that the pindaric is a form that has been adapted by poets into the present, proving it a hardy literary survivor. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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