Pindarics

Pindarics (alternatively Pindariques or Pindaricks) was a term for a class of loose and irregular odes greatly in fashion in England during the close of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. Abraham Cowley, who published fifteen Pindarique Odes in 1656, was the poet most identified with the form though many others had composed irregular verses before him. The term is derived from the name of a Greek archaic poet, Pindar, but is based on a misconception since Pindar's odes were in fact very formal, obeying a triadic structure, in which the form of the first stanza (strophe) was repeated in the second stanza (antistrophe), followed by a third stanza (epode) that introduced variations but whose form was repeated by other epodes in subsequent triads. Cowley's Resurrection, which was considered in the 17th century to be a model of the 'pindaric' style, is a formless poem of sixty-four lines, arbitrarily divided, not into triads, but into four stanzas of unequal volume and structure; the lines which form these stanzas are of lengths varying from three feet to seven feet, with rhymes repeated in no order. It was the looseness of these 'pindarics' that appealed to many poets at the close of the 17th century, including John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and many lesser poets, such as John Oldham, Aphra Behn, Thomas Otway, Thomas Sprat, John Hughes and Thomas Flatman.

John Milton employed 'pindarics' for the chorus of his lyrical tragedy, Samson Agonistes, published in 1670/71 (and probably composed in the 1660s) but he was a classical scholar and he termed them more appropriately:

The form in this sense can be thought to be modelled on the works of the tragic poet Aeschylus, as noted by Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips:

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