Poetry and Poetic Criticism 29 Mock-epic (Mock-heroic) Itis a type of poetry in which the poet humorously and wittily attempts an apotheosis of the silly and trivial contemporary matter by presenting itin an epical grand style. Here the scale of values is reversed : the great is made small, and the small great, thereby producing an amusing and at times ridiculous effect. The most brilliant example in English poetry is Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, where Belinda, the society lady, is compared to an epic hero, sylphs substitute the Olympian gods, and the game of amour is invested with the seriousness of a heroic battle, Pope also wittily exploits epic devices like Invocation, Allusion, Simile, Vision, Supernatural intervention. Samuel Butler’s Hudibras is another remarkable mock-epic of sizeable length, written in three parts between 1663 and 1678. Inspired by Cervantes and Rabelais, this work of Butler was meant to ridicule Puritanism and the Commonwealth. Its style came to be known as ‘Hudibrastic’. Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe is an example of miniature mock-epic. Negative capability The expression contains an apparent contradiction, because capability is always regarded as a positive quality. But the poet, John Keats invented this phrase to mean a special state or condition of a creative mind. To quote the exact words from the letter in which Keats used the term, ‘Negative capability, that is, when. man,is:capable-of being:iny factland eason’sThat way, a great poet like Shakespeare can calmly accept the opposites of life, and wonder at the mysteries of life and nature, without relentlessly reasoning out a fixed conclusion, and is able to capture a broad and complete vision of a moment or an experience. That is how Keats can relaxedly accommodate and co- ordinate the enjoyable gifts of Autumn with its mists and migrating swallows, signalling the advent of winter. Keats asserted that Shakespeare possessed this quality ‘enormously’, and thought that poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth lacked it. It may be inferred that ‘negative capability’ also implies an impersonal or objective approach to the subject, maintaining an aesthetic distance from it, and rising beyond the conventional material standards while Appreciating a beautiful artistic creation. It is, far from passive indolence,nd Prosody 240 Studies in English Rhetor it is rather an imaginative perception free from personal liking or prejudice, in order to feel and communicate artistic beauty as fully as possible, Ode ‘The Original of the English word ‘Ode’ is Greek O d e, a contracted form of aoid ¢ ,averb, meaning to"sing?. In modern English literature, it is used in the sense of alyric ofa stately and elaborate kind»Some “gravity and dignity of manner and a certain ceremony of style » differentiate an ode from a lyric, as it is popularly understood to be. OF the external characteristics of the ode two other points are notable : it is almost always written in the form of an address or invocation to somebody, or something, or, an abstraction; and it is rarely unrhymed. There are two main models of the classical ode; the Pindaric (named after Pindar) and the Horatian (named after Horace). Pindaric odes are passionate in spirit; but the energetic flow of verse in them is artistically moulded into a definite rhythmic pattern. Gray popularized in English the true Pindaric form in The Progress of Poesy and The Bard. The movement of ‘strophes’ and ‘antistrophes’ in the former is slow and grave, and the ‘epodes’ are exciting. Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind and Keats’s Ode fo a Nightingale are encomiastic, and may be called individual moulding of the Pindaric type, without much care for metrical technicalities. But behind their apparent artlessness, a great artistic consciousness is at work. ay remarkable for their restraint, sobriety and of thought. They are characterized by a slow, majestic movement. Marvell's Horatian Ode, Wordsworth's Ode to Duty and Tennyson's Ode to Wellington are some of the English specimens of the Horatian type. But often English odes cannot be strictly classified. Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, for example, combines both Pindaric and Horatian qualities, as it combines subjective experience with Platonic philosophy. Ottava rima It is a stanza pattern which has come from The very name suggests its meaning that th ists of ‘eight lines, and the rhyme scheme is:abablabee. Among the English Posts Byron used it extensively for comic and satiric purposes; e.g. the