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What Praise Poems Are For

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan Stewart
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Abstract

This essay is concerned with the relations between praise and aesthetic freedom exemplified by the practice of making odes. The ritual, economic, and agonistic functions of Pindaric odes and the mastering of subjective enthusiasm and objectification of value that Hegel found at work in such poems are compared with the belated, self-transforming expression of emotion characterizing Coleridge's composition of his “Dejection: An Ode” of 1802.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 1: Special Topic: On Poetry , January 2005 , pp. 235 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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References

Notes

A version of this essay was first drafted for the conference Poetry and Knowledge held at Princeton University in April 2003. My thanks go to Sam Stewart-Halevy and Wesley Smith for help with Coleridge's Greek.

1 “I am not a sculptor, so as to fashion stationary / statues that stand on their same base. / Rather, on board every ship / and in every boat, sweet song, / go forth from Aigina and spread the news” (47).

2 “I will halt, for not every exact truth / is better for showing its face, / and silence is often the wisest thing / for a man to observe” (49).

3 Leslie Kurke has explained of Pindar scholarship, “What earlier scholars had read as obscure historical allusion or sheer incoherence, we have learned to recognize as the masterful ellipses, manipulations, and baroque elaborations of a consummate poet composing for an audience that shared his complete familiarity with the conventions of praise” (10).

4 Although a number of Pindarics touch on themes of birth and unusual births, Nemean ode 7—to Sogenes of Aigina, winner of the boys' pentathlon—is particularly relevant for its apostrophe to Eileithuia, goddess of childbirth. See the extensive discussion of the relation between athletic victory and the rebirth of a house's reputation with the maieutic powers of Eileithuia in Kurke 71–72.

5 See Beer's “Excursus Notes” in Coleridge, Aids 563. Beer cites Coleridge's Marginalia 585.

6 Poetical Works 35. In early November 1791, he wrote in a letter that he had been “reading Pindar, and composing Greek verse, like a mad dog,” and a few months later he won a prize at Cambridge for his “Sors Misera Servorum in Insulis Indiæ Occidentalis,” a Sapphic ode on the West Indian slave trade (Poetical Works 72–84). In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge writes several pages on the problem of translating Pindarics and on Cowley's opinions about Pindaric translations (2: 66–67).

7 John Worthen argues against the likelihood of either a mutually romantic or a realized sexual relationship between Coleridge and Hutchinson (104, 312n15)—a suggestion that was made by such earlier biographers as Holmes, Whalley, and Ashton. Of course, for the purposes of understanding Coleridge's choice of poetic form, as opposed to understanding the motivations of his actual actions in history, the terms of his imaginative life are as relevant as, perhaps more relevant than, the terms of his realized life.

8 Another possible antecedent for the structure of “Dejection” is the model from the Pauline epistles where letter writing involves thanksgiving passages broken by “joyful intercessions.” The thanksgiving is a specific poetic genre still extant in the seventeenth century, but with the advent of neoclassicism, it seems to become absorbed into the ode (O'Brien 20–46, 62–104).

9 This list is taken from Parrish. For further discussion of the substitutions in the many versions of the poem, see Mays's variorum edition (Poetical Works: notes to “A Letter to_____” [861–75], to “Dejection: An Ode” [884–97], and to “The Day Dream” [897–99]).

10 By the time of Shelley's “Defence,” to compose has the negative implication of too much controlling intention: “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet” (504).

11 Dorothy Wordsworth's journals habitually record the appearance of the moon, referring to it as “crescent” (5, 15, 33, 38, 47, 141, 146, 152), an “auld moon” (96), “a silver boat” (97), “a perfect rainbow” (143), “horned” (150), “contracting” (143), “sailing” (142), and “like a gold ring snapped in two” (76).

12 For a discussion of the differences between odes on and odes to, see Fry: “Whereas an ‘ode on’ simply announces a topic, sometimes carrying in its title the lapidary suggestion that it is literally inscribed on its object, an ‘ode to’ claims to be a poem of address” (27).

13 Coleridge was usually absent during the births of his children (Holmes 122–23, 282). Though he was devoted to his children as they grew, recording, for example, detailed notes about Hartley's development (182), he also referred in his letters to his wife's “breeding” (322).