Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450-1700 is
the companion volume to the 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
include discussion of odes by early Italian experimenters, Ronsard
and his followers, and major English poets — Milton, Marvell,
Cowley, Dryden, Behn, Drayton, Jonson, and Spenser.