From Horace to Neruda to Outer Space: How the Ode Continues to Elevate the Ordinary

A look at how the ode has changed, and how it's stayed the same.

Before I was a twenty-year-old-woman writing an essay about odes in her college creative writing workshop, I was a seventeen-year-old-girl scrawling angsty poems in her poetry workshops on Zoom. I turned to poetry during the pandemic, because my pain felt enormous and I needed somewhere to put it. I was able to fit my messy and boundless emotions into neat stanzas and set rhyme schemes, and I saw my grief mirrored in the work of all my peers. I spent the winter and spring of my junior year of high school writing and workshopping poems through Vanderbilt’s Programs for Talented Youth. Most of my poems carried a weight I was only comfortable holding through writing. I believed good poems were about bad things that a poet survived. One day, while absent-mindedly writing one of those poems, my ears perked up at my teacher Carlina Duan’s mention of “a radical hope.” She talked about poetry as a way of exploring light but never shying away from darkness. As she spoke, I forgot whatever I was wallowing about and began to furiously write a new story. A story where poems were more than just dumping grounds for the emotions I was experiencing. Suddenly, I saw poetry as a place to believe in.

Soon after seeing poetry as a celebration, I stumbled upon the ode. It’s a form that’s been on my mind ever since. Simply put, an ode is a poem with one purpose: to praise something. While most odes do include the word “ode” in the title, I decided to expand my search and definition of this form. Some of the poems I analyze in this essay do not start with “Ode to,” but they all rely on a craft aspect that is crucial to the form: elevation and attention. While the sculptor must see human form in a block of marble and chip away until everyone else can see it too, the poet simply must keep their eyes open to ordinary wonders and believe in their ability to tell about it.

To better add to our understanding of the ode, Merriam-Webster defines it as “a lyric poem usually marked by exaltation of feeling and style; something that shows respect for or celebrates the worth or influence of another.”

Another undercurrent I discovered that helped solidify my own definition of the ode and experience researching this form is that the ode is a poem for the people. While the ode requires the attention of a poet on their subject, which is a sort of intimacy, it is also a call for attention, for noticing. Through my research, I discovered that the ode has been serving the public for over 2,000 years.

The ode can be traced back to 5th century BC Greece, where they were traditionally sung and accompanied by a lyre. These odes celebrated athletes participating in the Greek classical games, like the Olympics. Penned by Pindar, these poems were lofty in nature, and celebrated the athletes as heroes. Pindaric odes were comprised of three parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. The choir would sing the strophe while moving one way across the stage, and then switch  (As a side note, if a choir was singing an ode to me as I crossed the finish line of the Eugene half-marathon this April, I may have run a little faster and not been focused on the cramping sensation blooming up my side body). The other prominent poet of the classical ode was Roman poet Horace, who wrote odes that focused on nature or abstract ideas. Horatian odes often have a distance between the subject and the poet, to showcase a sort of restraint between the two. Whether an ode fell under the umbrella of Pindaric or Horatian, the poem always acted as a pedestal. As Poetry Foundation defines them, odes have always been public poems.

The ode changed shape in the English Romantic movement, where poets like Keats and Wordsworth took inspiration from its ancient roots while also making them their own. Keats in particular took the more Horatian approach of writing odes as meditation, but replaced the need for narrative distance with intimacy. While reading one of Keats’s most famous odes—“Ode on a Grecian Urn”—I struggled to fully grasp what the poem was saying. I turned to a slim pink book all about Keats, in hopes of it bringing me an explanation.

In the introduction to “Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse,” Anahid Nersessian writes, “Odes, roughly speaking, are poems meant to celebrate something or someone, but because they are written from a place of emotional excess or ferment it’s easy for them to tip over into more private preoccupations.” This got me thinking of the ode as a vessel for the writer to put all of their excess feelings. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is an ekphrastic ode, where Keats meditates on the art within a piece of art: the inscriptions on a Grecian urn he saw at the British Museum. He begins the poem:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

     Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus empress

      A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

At first, the reader may wonder, who exactly is Keats addressing? A bride or a child or a historian? Camille Guthrie, writing for The American Poetry Foundation, argues, “Coherence of metaphor is not essential in the traditional ode form, but excitement is.” With this in mind, I kept reading this poem for glimmers of excitement, not necessarily coherence. And I found excitement everywhere:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

         Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

When I stopped trying to make sense of everything that was going on in this poem, I saw it for what it was: a young man engaging with this ancient relic of art, trying to make sense of it, trying to tell its story. That is an ode in itself. Through researching the work of the ancient poets and Romantics, I wondered how the ode transformed from the epic to the meditative to the ordinary, while still holding onto its necessity of elevation.

The answer seemed to fall into my lap, in the form of book—this time almost 900 pages long, this time in bright green—I found in southern California. I was on spring break and had finished my only book on the plane, so I beelined to my safe place in any city: a book store. I bought All of the Odes by Pablo Neruda and lugged it to the beach where the pages collected sand and sunscreen. As my shoulders began to burn, I began to understand how Neruda changed the form to what we know today. Neruda wrote at least 225 odes in his life. He took the form and devoted it almost exclusively to the mundane—an onion, a watermelon, his socks. His lines were short and his poems were long, running down the page in thin columns. In Confieso que he vivido (Memoirs), Neruda writes, “In my work, I have tried to prove that the poet can write about any given subject, about something needed by a community as a whole.” Ilan Stavans adds in All of the Odes, “[Neruda] trusted that poetry, all types of poetry, and especially his own, had no owner. It was centrifugal and enduring, earthly and eternal. And it belongs to everyone.”

Again, the ode is a poem for the people. Neruda believed his odes belonged to everyone. He believed odes should be published in the news.

In “Ode to an Aged Poet,” translated from Spanish, Neruda writes:

Never had the ancient

bard

captured

with pen and unyielding paper

the overflowing river

of life

or the unidentified god

that flirted with his verse,

and now,

on his cheeks,

His ode to the aged poet goes on, for pages and pages. Neruda’s form is very unique, with one word often standing alone on a line. But his influence touched more on the subjects of his odes themselves. Neruda saw a “torpedo / from the ocean / depths, / a missile / that swam” in the limp body of a tuna in his “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market.” He found odes in the everyday, which allowed poets of the 21st century to follow suit.

One such example is Alex Dimitrov’s “Love.” In a stream-of-consciousness, almost diary-like entry, Dimitrov offers up hundreds of things he loves. He uses the repetition of “I love” to open each line. In parts of the poem, Dimitrov keeps its moving by association:

I love lighting candles.

I love religious spaces though I’m sometimes lost there. 

I love the sun for worshipping no one.

I love the sun for showing up every day.

Lighting a candle can transport the reader into a cathedral. Dimitrov then builds a bridge to cross so he can share what he loves about the sun. Other parts of the poem, however, are filled with spurts of images and ideas that seemingly don’t go together:

I love dessert for breakfast.

I love all of the dead. 

I love gardens.

I love holding my breath under water.

I love whoever it is untying our shoes.

While blending association with surprise, Dimitrov is quite literally shining spotlights on the various things he loves and believes are worth celebrating. He is not relying on many other craft techniques here; it is the craft of elevation that engages the reader and keeps the poem going. Dimitrov returns to association at the end:

And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended his eulogy by saying, ‘I cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will say au revoir.’

I love the different ways we have of saying the same thing.

I love anyone who cannot say goodbye.

Dimitrov ended up not saying goodbye to this project. In 2017, he continued to write about the things he loved and posted them everyday on a Twitter (X) account called @apoemcalledlove. Some recent entries include: “I love that head rush the wind gives you when it catches you on some corner & reminds you you’re very much alive” (Oct 2), and “I love those first October nights sleeping with the open window” (Oct 1). In a craft essay for Poets & Writers, Dimitrov writes about Marina Abramović’s belief that “the role of the artist is to elevate the public spirit.” He writes that by keeping the form accessible—via Twitter—and the words accessible—there’s no flowery language in his tweets; they cut straight to the image itself—the average person, perhaps not well-acquainted with poetry, could read his words and resonate with them. From my research, this was the most striking and memorable example of the contemporary ode. It holds onto the craft element of elevating the ordinary, while also acting as a poem for the public, posted on Twitter in accessible language every day.

Another example of the contemporary ode taking the form to—quite literally—new heights is U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” While poet laureates have traditionally shared their poetry at presidential inaugurations and government events, Limón has partnered with NASA to send her poem into outer space, on the Europa Clipper’s voyage to Jupiter’s second moon. This ode will leave our orbit and travel to outer space in October 2024. The poem begins with a description of “the night sky inky / with black expansiveness.”

Limón ends her poem with this:

We, too, are made of wonders, of great

and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,

of a need to call out through the dark.

Again, there is the mention of both great and ordinary loves. This poem is working as both an ode to space and an ode to the people on Earth. As if it were a mirror, it highlights our own journeys to second moons, our own voyages to new heights.

photo from Library of Congress

When I began the process of writing this essay, I started with a simple Google search: give me the definition of ode. Merriam-Webster first defines ode as a lyric poem, celebratory in nature. But their second definition struck me and proved just as helpful as the first: “way : path.” I began to think of the ode not just as a form but also a way of seeing the world. Since odes are celebratory in nature, if we open our eyes to them, will our life feel more like a celebration too?

James Parker at The Atlantic argues yes. As the man in charge of writing odes for The Atlantic since 2019, he describes this type of poetry as “thank you notes” to the gifts the universe sends us.

Parker writes, “Your odes, too—can you see them? They’re swimming in your ambience. They want to be written, but only by you. There’s an everlasting valentine at the nucleus of creation, and it’s got your name on it.”

In his article, Parker argues that when a poet writes more odes, more odes find them. Perhaps there’s some universal power or god of poetry that delivers odes to those who wish to write them, but I think this speaks more to the power of attention. When we attune our eyes to poetry, the poetry finds us. This is, undoubtedly, a way to live a life.

I still remember where I was when I learned I got into Kidd. It was the spring of freshman year, and I hadn’t been writing much poetry. I was stuck in a cloud of grief caused by my grandfather’s death that year, mixed with the overall confusion of beginning a new chapter in life. I remember I spent a lot of that season sitting underneath a willow tree near my dorm, thinking to myself, When will I get back to my old self? The self who could write poems about this, who felt everything instead of feeling numb? This seems like a poetic moment in hindsight.

I got the acceptance email while on a blind date in a diner where the only thing we ordered was bad black coffee and he took all the cream. Our conversation lurched on for a painful thirty minutes, and when he said we should get the bill after one mug of coffee, I didn’t complain.

I needed to call my mom and tell her that I got in the workshops. I needed to tell her I felt like my life could change.

What I’ve learned through my experience at Kidd is similar to what Parker learned while writing odes for The Atlantic: the more you show up for poetry, the more it will show up for you.

I leaned into the ode form for many of the assignments this year. I wrote odes to my dad and to star nosed moles. I wrote odes to pickleball and to people I belong to and people who have left my life. But the ode that stands most out to me is the first poem I wrote for this workshop. I didn’t know I’d be writing a research paper on odes when I wrote “Ode to my laptop keyboard” last October. But the words I wrote then captured, or maybe predicted, what I know now: the ordinary can become the universal through elevation and attention. I know now that to write an ode means to see a spark of light in something, which also means odes require belief, which takes me back to my first revelation about poetry that maybe my poems were a place to put my hope, not just pain. And I’ve learned that if you’re going to write a research paper about odes, you might just realize by the end of it that you wrote one long ode to the form itself.

Like what Limón wrote in her poem for Europa, perhaps the ode is also a way of calling through the dark.