Ode

An ode is a type of lyric poem. The word comes from the Ancient Greek. An ode is a poem which is written in praise of something or someone, saying how wonderful they are.

Very often an ode will have the title "Ode to..." followed by the name of the thing or person that it describes, e.g. John Keats wrote a poem "Ode to a Nightingale".

Odes were written by the poets of Ancient Greece as well as by the Romans. Horace was particularly famous for his odes, and many English odes written centuries later were based on Horace's lyrical verses.

Poets who wrote odes

• John Keats
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• William Wordsworth
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Edmund Spenser
• Pablo Neruda
• Horace
• Ovid
• Sappho