Ode

A curious genre, the ode operates as both a celebration and lament: it celebrates and memorialises heroes (for Pindar, the prowess of athletes), but it also laments life’s transience, all the while hoping that art will secure immortality for its subjects and the humble poet. In her posthumously published collection, On the Periphery (1976), Forrest-Thomson – who died in 1975 at the young age of 27 – exhibited a late flourish of ode writing. Always prone to idolise and imitate a range of poets in order to produce a resonant tone of memorialisation, in many of her later poems, Forrest-Thomson renovates the elevated art of the ode, not just as a memorial and address to dead poets, but also as a celebration of their craft. For her, the ode was a mode of artifice-resurrection, with quotation, imitation and parody as so many ways of resuscitating sometimes long-dead craft. But the ode is not just an isolated literary genre, and this chapter suggests that Forrest-Thomson inaugurated a new form of ode, inspiring a burgeoning of politically-informed ode practices of present and future poets.