Odes Quotes

Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.

One word of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole ode from a man . .

This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity

Horace's best ode would not please a young woman as much as the mediocre verses of the young man she is in love with.

The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain,
from a quatrain to a sonnet,
from a sonnet to a ballad,
from a ballad to an ode,
from an ode to a cantata,
and from a cantata to a dithyramb.
A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.

Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

Pulvis et umbra sumsu." ~ Horace, Odes ("We are dust and Shadows")