Ode (Gr. ōdē, from aeidō, 'I sing'), a form of lyrical poetry associated in its supreme form with the name of Pindar, but practised with splendid success by many English poets. The Greek ode was simply a chant or poem arranged to be sung to an instrumental accompaniment, and all the variations of form that occurred were merely subjective, incapable of imitation, and conditioned only by the exigencies of the music. Archilochus was the first to expand the simple distich into an epode; Alcmán, to adopt the more complex form of the carmen or ode. Sappho, Alcæus, and Anacreon carried it further, and shaped the lighter form of ode known to us, through the masterpieces of their greatest imitator, as the Horatian. Stesichorns modified the ode of Alcmán by elaborating a triple movement, in which the metrical wave moving in the strophe was answered by the counter-wave moving in the antistrophe, the whole concluded by the epode, a blended echo of the two. Simonides adapted this elaborate form to Dorian music, and next followed Pindar, the greatest master of the ode. His Parthenia or odes for virgins, his Skolia or dithyrambic odes in praise of Dionysus, and his enconiastic odes have all perished; only his Epinikia, or triumphal odes, remain. These display an infinite variety of metrical ingenuity; no two odes have the same metrical structure, yet each obeys a definite structural law, and license there is none in its irregularity. The Humanist poets imitated the simpler Ætolian measures as they found them in Catullus and Horace; but many of our poets, taking Pindaric as synonymous with irregular, produced so-called odes whose only likeness to their great original was their 'unshackled numbers.' But irregularity in verse is not allowable except in cases where it is a natural aid grasped by the poetic mood in its moment of exaltation; for the most constant charm of poetry is the inevitableness of cadence, which must never be lightly flung away unless to subserve another and still higher law—that of emotional necessity. It is only in the hands of a master that the ode may safely be imitated in English; by all others the apparent artifice of the form and the necessary spontaneity of the impulse may not be reconciled.
Ben Jonson's odes are unequal; Herrick's, poor; Spenser's Epithalamium, or marriage ode, is one of the most splendid triumphs of English poetry; and
Milton, in his magnificent poem, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, found in this a form adequate for that poetic exaltation which was his habitual mood. Cowley was already an expert in the Horatian ode, when he fell in with Pindar, and imitated him, in externals at least, in a number of elaborate compositions, usually redeemed from dullness by bursts of undoubted poetic power. Dryden has left at least three immortal odes, To Mistress Anne Killigrew, For St Cecilia's Day, and Alexander's Feast; and Congreve wrote not only a few admirable, if formal, examples, but an excellent critical Discourse on the Pindarique Ode (1705). The matchless Orinda, Lord Orrery, Ambrose Philips, Young, Akenside, and Shadwell followed after their kind; and Gray, first drawn to this form by Gilbert West, translator of Pindar, produced in 1754 and 1756 his two inimitable Pindaric odes, the Progress of Poesy and The Bard. The exquisitely poetic, though not Pindaric, odes of Collins were given to the world somewhat earlier. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson poured some of their noblest verse into this form, while modifying it further, whether as regular—i.e. following a definite arrangement in stanzas, or as irregular, following no such arrangement. There are no finer odes or nobler poems in our language than Coleridge's odes To the Departing Year and To France; Wordsworth's To Duty and Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood; Shelley's To the West Wind, To a Skylark, To Liberty, and To Naples; Keats's odes To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn; Tennyson's funeral ode On the Death of the Duke of Wellington; and Swinburne's To Victor Hugo in Exile.
See English Odes (1881), admirably selected by Edmund W. Gosse, with an excellent introduction; and the subtle and suggestive article 'Poetry,' by Theodore Watts-Dunton, in vol. xix. (1885) of the Encyclopædia Britannica.