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The Ode’s Last Stand: An Irregular Approach to Modern Verse Jason Halil Nabi Charlottesville, Virginia B.A., Columbia College of Columbia University, 1997 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia December, 2013 ii Copyright by Jason Halil Nabi All rights reserved © 2013 iii ABSTRACT With the irregular ode’s dominance of the poetic scene during the Romantic period came a kind of obscurity: even as the ode became the lyrical idiom it lost its visibility as a form. Consequently, critical consensus lays the ode to rest in the early nineteenth century, but it is just here that the ode’s history takes a turn, as I argue that poets as diverse as Shelley, Tennyson, Pound, and Auden revive the form by embracing its prosodic pluralism, stressing its historical burdens, and addressing the demand for cultural relevance. This dissertation thus resumes the history of the ode in English after the Romantic perfection of the form and traces the ode’s survival into subsequent literary eras, where its over-conspicuousness consistently finds place in a larger aesthetic cycle – namely, the antagonism between essentialist and pluralist poetics that defines the major poetic and critical divides of literary history in English. In the first chapter, I explore Shelley’s intensive odic project, which begins with – rather than consummates in – “Ode to the West Wind,” and through which he turns away from the lyrical unity and quiescence of the odes of Wordsworth and Coleridge. That Shelley’s “other” odes have met with poetic and critical oblivion attests to the stronger allure of his predecessors’ essentialist aesthetic, to which he responds with a hyper- formal ode practice. In the second chapter, I trace Tennyson’s odic career, in which he turns a lifelong antagonism with the form to his advantage by deforming rather than abandoning its protocols. In the third chapter, I study how Pound’s use of the ode challenges the prevailing critical myths of his time, by which genre was being dissolved in the prosodic essentialism of his contemporaries. In the conclusion, I present a case study of Auden, who uses the ode precisely because it is an ideologically overburdened iv form, in order to explore the poetic evolutionary mechanism by which this most over- conspicuous of all forms has been turned into something unrecognizable – that is to say, virtually new. My study, by giving a historical dimension to the poetic of making it new, demonstrates that the ode’s disappearance during periods of poetic essentialism is really only a vanishing act, which ultimately is achieved through form rather than in spite of it. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Oh! this dissertation would not have come to pass without a number of wonderful people, each of whom have my profoundest gratitude and deserve their very own odes. I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee, each a generous and immensely brilliant reader, each a master of both survey and scrutiny: John Miller, for enduring a work that surely took interdisciplinary liberties with Pindar and Horace; sagacious Paul Hunter, a model of weaving together the panoramic and the particular; Jim Nohrnberg, the Red Cross knight who came to the project in its eleventh canto; and Chip Tucker, an incisive, ideaful, urging, patient, extensive, intensive reader, without whose belief in this project I simply wouldn’t have finished. I am thankful for the support of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Virginia, which generously provisioned me with a President’s Fellowship in my first years here and with a Robert J. Huskey Travel Fellowship in 2009. Those travel funds, along with a Postgraduate Bursary from the British Association for Victorian Studies, enabled me to attend the Tennyson Bicentenary Conference held by the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Because that conference reinvigorated my research and led by turns to my first publication, I am especially beholden to the generosity of these institutions. I am also grateful to the UVa English Department for the ample teaching opportunities over the years. I am particularly obliged to Jennifer Wicke, Dan Kinney, Jon D’Errico, and Clare Kinney for their advocacy, acumen, and positivity at various points throughout my career here. Deepest thanks to all the “McNabis” – Betsy, Ed, John, Mike, Ashley, Claire, and Emma – for providing backup, distraction, advice, and all other forms of encouragement vi over the years. Special thanks are due to my sister Beth, for always enlivening me with her sublime sense of humor and her passion for the Poet Laureate of the World (Bono). To my mother Doris – who has not only supported me immeasurably in this and every other phase of my life, but who taught me to read and to read well – I am forever grateful. This work is dedicated to my son Thomas, who has learned all too early in life what the word “dissertation” means (though this did not stop him from pulling out his LeapFrog and starting his own), and to my wife Liz, who not only completed the dissertation journey first while demonstrating it could all be done with grace, but who in all other aspects of our life has been my north star. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................ v TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 1 Ex nihilo, ad nauseam, ad nihil: A Brief History of the English Ode .......................................... 1 Ne plus ultra: Keats ...................................................................................................................... 5 Sequencing .................................................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1. Shelley’s Other Odes ............................................................................................ 17 1.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 17 1.2 Odes Unbound, Rebound ................................................................................................ 30 1.3 “Ode to the West Wind” ................................................................................................. 35 1.4 “An Ode, Written October 1819, Before the Spaniards Had Recovered Their Liberty” 42 1.5 “Ode to Heaven” ............................................................................................................. 49 1.6 “Ode to Liberty” ............................................................................................................. 59 1.7 “To a Sky-Lark” ............................................................................................................. 66 1.8 “Ode to Naples” .............................................................................................................. 73 CHAPTER 2. Tennyson’s Sublimed Odes .................................................................................. 83 2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 83 2.2 Ody (O.D.) ...................................................................................................................... 98 2.2.1 “Time: An Ode” ...................................................................................................... 100 2.2.2 “Ode: O Bosky Brook” ............................................................................................ 110 2.2.3 “I dare not write an Ode…” ...................................................................................... 123 2.3 Mel-ody ........................................................................................................................ 128 2.4 Palinody ........................................................................................................................ 141 2.4.1 “Ode to Memory” ..................................................................................................... 146 2.4.2 “Mariana” ................................................................................................................. 152 2.5 Sublimed ....................................................................................................................... 154 2.6 Para-ody ........................................................................................................................ 160 2.6.1 The Island Poems ..................................................................................................... 166 2.6.2 The Princess ............................................................................................................. 177 2.6.3 “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” ....................................................... 189 2.7 Maud: The Free Ode .................................................................................................... 196 2.8 Coda: Into Modernity .................................................................................................
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