An Ode, humbly inscrib'd to the Queen. On the glorious Success of Her Majesty s Arms, MDCCVI. Written in Imitation of Spenser s Style. Printed in the Year MDCCXXV [1725]

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8vo (160 x 96mm). 259pp. (plus 2 for contents at end). Engraved vignettes for chapter headings. Period calf; (lacking first blank, front joint split but holding, occasional stains; spine worn, rubbed). Modern pencil ownership inscription to front pastedown "Mr. Cartwright." Famed anonymous work by Matthew Prior, important English poet and diplomat. His 35 stanzas of laureate verse celebrated the Duke of Marlborough s victory at Ramillies and marked a turning point in the Spenserian tradition. The Ode was most interesting in metrical form and like many of Prior s poems, it is in content strongest at the end. The Ode s themes combine praise of Anne and Marlborough (whom the poem treats as William s successor), mockery of Prior s panegyric talents and a wish for a lasting peace. The heroic ode avoided such narrative difficulties by appealing to the patriotic and religious sentiments that were more suitable to a modern commercial republic. Moreover, the Ode appeared the same year as William Congreve s much-admired essay (A Discourse on the Pindarique Ode) calling for regularity in the Pindaric ode; the "Prior" stanza could be used in either this sort of formal ode or in the more familiar Horatian mode. Prior chose for the poem, and defended in its preface, a modified form of the Spenserian stanza, with a less complicated rhyme scheme in the octave and a rhyming alexandrine couplet at the end. For the first time in almost a century an English poet introduced archaisms into a non-burlesque poem deliberately imitating Spenser s manner. Adaptable as it was, the new stanza did much to reintroduce alternating rhymes into several forms of English poetry, thereby making Spenser s prosody more acceptable than it had been for a long while. Important work for poetry and the 18th-century Spenserian revival. N° de ref. del artículo D3096

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