Elegy, Epic, Ode--What's the Difference?

I should begin by saying I am not versed in the Welsh or Anglo Saxon elegiac tradition and I am fully aware that I am likely glossing over “elegy” as it relates to these, so please feel free to fill in the gaps. In part, I want to respond to Ben’s question about the way Elegy is working out / evolving in poems like the Wanderer and Beowulf and I want to flesh out this curious distinction between Epic and Elegy, without any knowledge of Tolkien's argument. For some reason, I want to use the classic Ode form to help me explore the distinction between Elegy and Epic. How will this all bring any ecocritical light to the poems? I’m not sure yet… One of my favorite poet critics, Ellen Bryant Voigt, states that poetic form is, most simply, the “right relation of all the parts.” It seems to me, then, that a poet’s choice of form—how all the parts are intentionally related—might be a useful way to uncover ecocritical implications….

Ode is derived from “odein” the Greek word for “to chant” and was used in English poetry as the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms. Nowadays, we are likely to associate it with Keats, Wordsworth, and other romantics as simply a romantic reflection on nature, beauty, art and the process of making a poem, whereby there is usually a move from physical description to meditation and finally to some kind of insight, resolution, stasis. According to Stephen Fry, who traces the evolution of the Ode and other forms in “The Ode Less Traveled” (whose title undermines its value), we most commonly conceive of poems as Odes where “An object, phenomenon or image is invoked, addressed or observed by an (often troubled) ode writer; the observation provokes though which in turn results in some kind of conclusion, decision or realization.” Fry questions whether this designation is descendent from the Ode tradition, or the medieval Sonnet, and he remains skeptical about the extent to which common usage of “Ode” reflects the original.

However, what seems particular to the Ode, even from the earliest forms, is a direct address or invocation at the start, which might be an “O” of praise or an “Oh” of realization. The Pindaric Ode seems appropriate to either of these impetuses, given the typical three-part structure commonly associated with the mode: Strophe (Turn), Antistrophe (Counter-turn), and Epode (Stand). Fry says of the classical form: “Pindar is associated with a form much more suited to ceremonial occasions and public addresses…He developed it from a choral dance for the purpose of making encomiums or praise songs that congratulate athletes or generals on their victories…” In addition to the “O” or the “Oh,” the dialectical structure is another feature inherent in the Ode, despite variations, and it might be generally thought of as a reenactment of the discovery process: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Inevitably, though, something doesn’t “fit” and every attempt at resolution fails to some degree, affirming, in a ritualistic way, limits of human perception and incapacity for synthesis. In this sense, the Ode begins a movement that perpetuates itself beyond the poem. With this in mind, it seems the Ode form parallels (perhaps recounts) epic content. Though the Epic assumes a linear narrative and “straight-forwardness” in terms of chronology in a way that Ode does not, the “narrative arc” consists in the series of conflicts, turns, and returns. I am thinking of Thoreau and how his passages between “civilized” world and Walden—both the actual move and the intermittent travels to the village/back—as well as his “reading” parallel both Ode and Epic.

The Elegy is, at its most basic, a mournful poem, a looking back, an affirmation of what is gone or past. To state the obvious, Elegy is absolutely dependent on the present, an external referent to memory. It is only in the “presence” of something, that “absence” arises, and to some degree, the elegy functions as the measuring stick between the present and the past, presence and absence, external world and memory, physical and emotional, etc…. Strangely, though, in “The Wanderer,” what is lost must be withheld. Memory and dream must be consciously “bound” to the interior and not let out, but concealed from the natural world, which is always taking away, creating more and more absence as a sort of anti-creation. If The Wanderer expresses his inward grief, as a true elegy would, he would lose even his ability to contain absence, memory.
The turning back of the elegy affirms a present counterpart, and to some degree, enacts a sequence of turns, much like the Ode, if only to circumscribe what is gone. At their most basic levels, then, it seems the Ode and Elegy have much in common, in that they operate by turns in time and consciousness, turns between natural and human, physical and emotional, etc…in order to enact praise, honor, mourning, preservation, recovery. The “O” and “Oh” seem relevant to elegy and the process of grief and mourning, insofar as the elegy functions to both honor (O!) or invoke a specific person, place or thing, and to bury it—which is often a dialectical process comprised of many turns and realizations (Ohs).

All in all, it seems to me that Ode and Elegy might be more helpful as similar or interrelated processes that stem from different occasions or objectives. Perhaps the Ode process, the perpetual turning and anti-resolution, is simply the residue of human effort toward reconciliation with time and space, otherwise death, memory, civilization and the natural world. I realize all this Ode-talk sounds like a rough paraphrase of T.S. Eliot….

Perhaps what matters about Ode and Elegy and Epic, is how they differ in the degree to which the writing is organized to reflect process (however Ode-like it may or may not be) and how time is treated therein….perhaps this leads into the tenuous distinction between narrative and lyric—one that interests and confounds me a great deal.

I fully plan to apply these ideas to Beowulf at some point….