Pindarics was a term for a class of loose and irregular odes greatly in fashion in England during the close of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. Abraham Cowley, who published fifteen Pindarique Odes in 1656, was the poet most identified with the form though many others had composed irregular verses before him. The term is derived from the name of a Greek archaic poet, Pindar, but is based on a misconception since Pindar's odes were in fact very formal, obeying a triadic structure, in which the form of the first stanza was repeated in the second stanza, followed by a third stanza that introduced variations but whose form was repeated by other epodes in subsequent triads. Cowley's Resurrection, which was considered in the 17th century to be a model of the 'pindaric' style, is a formless poem of sixty-four lines, arbitrarily divided, not into triads, but into four stanzas of unequal volume and structure; the lines which form these stanzas are of lengths varying from three feet to seven feet, with rhymes repeated in no order. It was the looseness of these 'pindarics' that appealed to many poets at the close of the 17th century, including John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and many lesser poets, such as John Oldham, Aphra Behn, Thomas Otway, Thomas Sprat, John Hughes and Thomas Flatman. John Milton employed 'pindarics' for the chorus of his lyrical tragedy, Samson Agonistes, published in 1670/71 but he was a classical scholar and he termed them more appropriately: The form in this sense can be thought to be modelled on the works of the tragic poet Aeschylus, as noted by Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips: Phillips was one of his uncle's pupils and his views may have been shaped by Milton's theories as early as the 1640s yet he also reproduced some of the great poet's later views and his reactions to the literary fashions of the Restoration. Thus he contrasts 'pindarics' with rhyming couplets as a verse form suited to tragedy: In Discourse on the Pindarique Ode, 1706, the dramatist William Congreve, reviled pindarics as "bundles of rambling incoherent thoughts" and "uncertain and perplexed verses and rhymes". Joseph Addison dismissed them in 1711 in the journal The Spectator as monstrous Compositions. Richard Steele in an entry in the Spectator the following year underscored the difference between English pindarics and the verse of Pindar by imagining the Greek poet in Cowley's companybut not for long: The pindaric came to be commonly used for complimentary poems on births, weddings and funerals. Although the vogue of these forms hardly survived the age of Queen Anne, something of the tradition still remained, and even in the odes of Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridgethe broken versification of Cowley's pindarics occasionally survives. Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington may be considered another specimen of a pindaric in English literature, as seen for example in the opening and closing lines:
