Stella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

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Previous articleNext article FreeStella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700. Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.Boris MaslovBoris MaslovUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe 1990s and the 2000s proved a remarkably fruitful period in the study of Pindar’s postclassical reception.1 The book reviewed here is anteceded by Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-Ode: 1450–1700 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), by the same author, which focuses on Pindaric influences on Renaissance religious poetry. In Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode, Stella Revard turns to nonreligious lyric genres (including political occasional poetry, familiar ode, odic epistle, odes in praise of cities, nuptial ode, and pastoral), in which she seeks to uncover elements deriving from Pindar’s victory odes (epinikia). While England is at the center of attention, Italian and French poetry are also discussed in substantial detail, and Neo-Latin texts are treated in extenso alongside poems written in the vernaculars.Chapter 1 centers on the reception of Pindar in Renaissance Italy, when poets such as Francesco Filelfo, Giovanni Pontano, and Benedetto Lampridio used Pindar’s odes, newly imported from Byzantium, to mold a new literary medium for appealing to their patrons. As Revard stresses, the reception of Pindaric epinikia was mediated by Horace’s odes; in particular, in Latin Pindarics, Renaissance poets preferred Horatian shorter stanzas to Pindar’s triads. Concluding the chapter is a discussion of Sebastiani Minturno, who not only practiced Pindaric poetics but also expounded it in his 1563 L’arte poetica (40 n. 86).In chapter 2, Revard turns to Ronsard’s reform of the Pindaric ode and its repercussions in France and elsewhere in Europe. Among aspects of Pindar’s poetics that proved particularly serviceable to Ronsard and his French followers are the concern with inherited (dynastic) glory (57), a poetic mythology of the Muses and the Graces, as well as an emphasis on immortality conferred by poetry on both the poet and the honoree (cf. 49). Following a sampling of the work by Olivier de Magny, Joachim Du Bellay, Jacques Tahureau, Amadis Jamyn, Isaac Habert, Clovis Hesteau, and Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, Revard briefly discusses the reform of the Pindaric ode undertaken by François de Malherbe, who rejected the triads in favor of regularized stanzas (66–67). Beyond France, Revard considers the encomiastic production of Gabriello Chiabrera, Paulus Melissus, and Janus Dousa; the latter two wrote Latin odes to Elizabeth in the 1580s, thus conveying a Ronsardian odic poetics to England. Chapters 3 and 4, which discuss Andrew Marvell’s and Abraham Cowley’s adaptations of the Pindaric ode in the 1650s and 1660s, form the core of the book. Chapter 3 opens with a discussion of two poetic precedents: the work of the Polish Neo-Latin poet Casimire Sarbiewski, who influenced both Marvell and Cowley, contributing to a distinctive “philosophical” bent that the Pindaric assumed in England (92–93), and encomiastic odes regularly delivered by the faculty at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford for dynastic occasions. In his three odes on Cromwell, Marvell combines panegyrical topoi with a reflective, analytical stance, the use of moral sententiae being a notable token of Pindaric influence (105).Perhaps the most original contribution of the book is Revard’s analysis of Cowley’s Pindarique Odes (1656) as covert royalist commentary. According to Revard, Cowley’s poetic obscurity—ostensibly licensed by Pindar—provided a vehicle for nonconformist political views (139–40); notably, Cowley chose to ignore the responsion in Pindar’s triads to proffer a stanzaic medium of unparalleled looseness (142–43). More particularly, Revard argues that in his translation of Pindar’s Olympian 2, Cowley remolds the Theban myth of Laius’s progeny to evoke the succession of the Stuart monarchs, with Prince Charles represented by Thersander (132–33). Similarly, in a rendition of Nemean 1, the representation of Chromius is adapted to that of young Charles II. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Cowley’s original poems, demonstrating how the Pindaric ode outgrows the panegyrical function and comes to encompass historical and moral reflection.Later in the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century, both major and minor poets adopted Cowley’s stanzas as well as some of Cowley’s myths (for example, the myth of infant Heracles in Nemean 1 used to praise a young ruler). Chapter 5 discusses John Dryden’s poems mourning the death of Charles II and commenting on the ensuing crisis of succession and Aphra Behn’s tongue-in-cheek odes related to the accession of William and Mary. A crisis of the Pindaric ode as a poetic medium in the late seventeenth century prompted apologias by Boileau and Congreve, who both upheld its putative regularity, the latter rejecting the Cowlean ode and reverting to triads; this move, however, had few followers (190).Chapters 6–9 discuss the deployment of the Pindaric style and devices in three genres neighboring on the Pindaric ode proper: “threnody” (or “ode-elegy”), “familiar Pindaric,” and “city ode.” As these chapters demonstrate, public lyric partially modeled on Pindar’s epinikia was a chief medium for occasional verse in the early modern period.Chapter 6 surveys funerary and “elegiac” odes written on the Continent by Angelo Poliziano, Lampridio, Joannes Secundus, Ronsard, de Sainte-Marthe, and Daniel Heinsius, a body of writing whose possible influence on Jonson and Milton is assessed in chapter 7. Revard contends that the Pindaric precedent, mediated by Continental poets, is significant for Jonson in the Cary-Morson ode inasmuch as it is a poem “of ‘mixed’ occasion” (224). Revard regards the Neo-Latin tradition as a link between Pindar and Milton’s funerary odes; the relevance of the Pindaric tradition to “Lycidas” is detected in its digressive poetics (233). In conclusion, Cowley’s ode on the death of Katherine Philips and Dryden’s odic memorial for Anne Killigrew are discussed.In chapter 8, Revard turns to the “familiar Pindaric,” stressing the fluidity of the boundary between the “Horatian” and “Pindaric” ode in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when “Pindaric ode was perceived as a heterogeneous medium, a poetic catch-all” (257). Texts discussed include Ronsard’s odes to friends, Milton’s Latin Pindaric to John Rouse (in which Milton incorporated Pindaric elements in a “humanistic epistolary ode”), Cowley’s ode to Hobbes, and Behn’s familiar Pindarics. Chapter 9, focusing on odes in praise of cities, discusses continental poets Alamanni, Joseph Scaliger, Melissus, and Torquato Tasso (the latter intent on integrating the nuptial ode and the city ode). The relevance of Pindar for the city ode is debatable; accordingly, Revard speaks of particular Pindaric elements rather than of the genre of Pindaric ode per se. In Spenser’s Prothalamion (1596), which combines “city-ode, wedding song, personal complaint, and political encomium,” the Pindaric mode is manifested in the poem’s generic hybridity (307). In conclusion, Revard dwells on Milton’s use of humanistic city-ode in Satan’s praise of Rome and Athens in book 4 of Paradise Regained (1671). While Milton’s reliance on Pindar or the Pindaric tradition in this case is only a distant possibility, this conclusion is in keeping with an overarching objective of the last three chapters of the book, which is to uncover Pindar’s oblique presence in Milton’s oeuvre.Stella Revard’s approach differs markedly from that espoused in the two best-known monographs on Pindar’s reception written in English: William Fitzgerald’s Agonistic Poetry: The Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, Hölderlin, and the English Ode (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Hamilton’s Soliciting Darkness. Fitzgerald and Hamilton freely move between cultures and epochs, dwelling on some of the best-known episodes in Pindaric reception, such as Horace’s Odes or Hölderlin’s Pindaric experiments, which they explore in theory-driven close readings.2 By contrast, Revard provides a detailed account of a variety of politically charged public lyric within a particular (albeit broadly defined) time period. Accordingly, she does not avoid discussing poets known only to a handful of specialists or poems that have never been reprinted. Revard eschews risky close readings, limiting discussion of most texts to summaries and selective quotation, and claims no critical-theoretical insights, adhering instead to a commonsensical philological method, with its precarious balance of stylistics, politics, biography, intertextuality, and prosodic analysis.The result is a thick description of an underappreciated set of poetic practices, which often makes for dense reading yet offers considerable analytic gains. First, the reader obtains a synoptic view of the wide range of Pindaric themes and devices shared by Renaissance and early modern poets of various calibers. Second, in-depth consideration of the literary-historical context, encompassing poetic production in Latin and in the vernaculars, makes it possible to situate and evaluate more adequately particular choices made by major poets like Ronsard or Milton who no longer appear—in that whimsical fashion common to many studies in comparative literature—as Horace’s and Pindar’s great solitary interlocutors. In this sense, Revard’s study moves beyond an inert notion of the classical tradition that dominates much Anglo-American scholarship.One methodological limitation of the book stems from its overall adherence to a variety of historicism that views literary texts as responses to particular political circumstances, while failing to read changes and continuities in poetic form as themselves historically meaningful. At the same time, the book’s emphasis on myths, with their ostensible pertinence to politics, implies less attention to poetics proper, so that readers looking for a historical survey of prosodic forms of Pindaric lyric and their dissemination—a survey that the author’s deep engagement with primary sources makes her uniquely well-prepared to provide—will have their curiosity piqued but not satisfied. What one misses is an attempt to link the rise and fall of different varieties of the Pindaric to broader cultural-historical processes. One may hypothesize, for example, that the Pindaric ode played an important role in the transition from Neo-Latin poetry to imitation of classical genres in the vernacular, as the putative looseness of the Pindaric medium made it possible to engage in a patently classicizing poetic practice in one’s native tongue without being excessively concerned with prosodic (and stanzaic) transposition. Furthermore, the evolution of the Pindaric epinikion, seen to embody an emphatic, rhetorical style, as a principal model for public lyric was in all probability aided by the Renaissance conflation of the poet and the orator. Conversely, the emphasis on the putative regularity of the Pindaric ode in the late seventeeth century may be related to a neoclassical sensibility.Perhaps the greatest interpretive difficulties in this study result from a lack of a systematic comparison of the Pindaric ode with the medieval and Renaissance panegyrical tradition going back to the late antique collection of Panegyrici Latini and continued, for example, in the university panegyrics briefly treated by Revard (92–98) or in the panegyrics on the king’s arrival, which are obviously related to the adventus tradition (58, 62). It is evident, for example, that “comparison with historical and mythic deeds accomplished by heroes of the past” need not betoken “the Pindaric manner” (16), as they were de rigueur in pre-Pindaric panegyrics. A particular leitmotif of Revard’s study is the comparison of the ruler to the sun, which she derives from Pindar: “In Olympian 1, [Pindar] compares rulers such as Hieron to the sun that in blazing majesty eclipses all other stars” (4; cf. 17, 23, 58, 62, 164). This is a misreading. What is being compared to the sun in the opening of Olympian 1 is the Olympic contest, not Hieron, whereas the comparison of the honoree to the sun is a staple of the broader encomiastic tradition (never attested in Pindar’s epinikia). More generally, a comparison with the inherited forms of the panegyric would make it possible to elucidate more clearly the utility of the Pindaric ode—and Pindaric “elements”—in the early modern literary system.Revard’s juxtaposition of early modern texts with particular Pindaric epinikia, albeit informative for a reader who has had no exposure to Pindar, is often methodologically at odds with the study’s focus on genres and inherited tropes; although Revard stops short of implying direct allusions, the linkage of Marvell’s ode on the death of Cromwell and Pindar’s Pythian 3 (112), or of Milton’s “Lycidas” and Pindar’s Pythian 12 (241–43), seems haphazard. Similarly, a recurrent issue in the book is the prominence of the Aeneid with its myth of imperial foundation for narrative sections in early modern Pindarics; Revard repeatedly points to a similar myth in Pindar’s Pythian 4 (31, 38–39, 50, 151), leaving the reader to wonder whether there are any reasons to prefer a hypothetical Pindaric intertext to an acknowledged Virgilian one. Arguably, the utility of the Pindaric medium—as a lyric form capable of incorporating, in condensed form, epic myth and epic battle scenes (cf. 86, 97)—is more important than the presence of a foundation narrative in one of Pindar’s epinikia. It is also not clear what a discussion of Pindar’s paeans (289–90), recovered—except for a few lines quoted by other classical authors—only in the late twentieth century thanks to papyri, can contribute to our understanding of the reception of Pindar in the Renaissance.Numerous infelicities occur in the discussion of Pindar’s texts and poetics. The reader should disregard ahistorical inferences (for instance, “Neither Pindar nor Marvell had any respect for true ‘tyrants’” [112]; “Pindar was a deeply religious man who reflected on defeat in the midst of victory” [198]), or iterations of outdated views on Pindar, such as his use of political allegory (Odysseus as “cipher” for Athens in Nemean 8 [243]) or of “thematic images” organizing the poem (241–42). It is also not the case that “Pindar often describes the onset of poetic inspiration as the welling up of spring water” (236), nor are the Homeric Hymns, which were—as all poetry in dactylic hexameter—performed solo, “the oldest examples of choral poetry” (236).These minor deficiencies—perhaps endemic to any study of a broadly comparative scope—do not impugn the immense value of Stella Revard’s book as the most thorough exposition of the Pindaric ode and kindred genres in the Renaissance to date. The book, which is well produced and supplied with informative indexes, is a true achievement of comparative literary history and will become an essential starting point for any scholar whose work touches on the early modern reception of classical genres or on political uses of lyric in the Renaissance. Notes 1Important monographs include Thomas Schmitz, Pindar in der französischen Renaissance: Studien zur seiner Rezeption in Philologie, Dichtungstheorie und Dichtung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993); John Hamilton, Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Martin Vöhler, Pindarrezeptionen: Sechs Studien zum Wandel des Pindarverständnisses von Erasmus bis Herder (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005).2For informed criticisms of Hamilton’s study, see reviews by William Waters in Modern Language Quarterly 67 (2006): 265–70, and by Adolf Köhnken in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 11 (2005): 602–6. 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