UC Irvine

The Poetry of Origins reevaluates the ode’s influence on the history of lyric poetry. Rather than treating the ode as an ancient genre, I assert that its development is modern and transatlantic. Inseparable from the histories of colonization and race that formed the modern world, the ode would be illegible without reference to the racialized communities that it has excluded and that have remained marginal to the study of lyric theory and history. My research addresses this absence by offering readings of Anglophone poetry that attest to the centrality of colonialism and chattel slavery to the emergence of the ode. I begin by establishing that there is a fundamental discontinuity between the ancient and modern ode. Centering the sense of historical dislocation that would become emblematic of the ode’s reception, I draw attention to the ancient genre of the palinode, a genre that emerged from Stesichorus's claim that Helen never sailed to Troy. Tracing the interplay of the palinode and ode in early modern Britain, I reveal how it encoded ambivalences surrounding the intellectual foundations of historical time. In the poetry of Edmund Spenser, such anxieties were reconciled in the entwining of landscape and authority. I argue that, after Spenser, personification and apostrophe came to define the ode as tropes of domestication, which allowed poets like John Milton and Abraham Cowley to offer an ideological infrastructure for colonial expansion. My dissertation concludes by examining the ode’s role as a vehicle through which White British authors of the eighteenth century projected their visions of Europe’s archaic past onto colonial subjects. Turning to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, I posit that her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral engendered forms of literary recognition and community not circumscribed by the foundational pull of the ode.