Pindar

Pindar (c.522–443 bc), Greek lyric poet, the majority of whose surviving works are the Olympian Odes celebrating victories in the games at Olympia and elsewhere. Antiquity's most notable exponent of the Greater Ode, he served as an inspiration to all subsequent poets attempting this difficult genre. His compositions were elevated and formal, distinguished by the boldness of their metaphors and a marked reliance on myth and gnomic utterance. He used a framework of strophe, antistrophe, and epode which his imitators sought to copy, but in Pindar this framework rested on an elaborate prosodic structure that remained unknown until it was worked out by August Boeckh in his edition of the Odes (1811). The 17th- and 18th-cent. writers of Pindarics—Cowley, Dryden, Pope, Gray—employed a much looser prosodic system, so that their odes, although elevated and rich in metaphor, lack Pindar's architectural quality. See also ode.