passions and careless drinking. They frequently added that the
ode was like the canzone, chanson, song, or even ballad. Valuable
criticism of the ode does not appear before the end of the seven-
teenth century. Critics needed to have the genre well established
before they could judge it.

No studies of the ode exist in French or Italian apart from
Carducci brilliant essay "Dello Svolgimento dell' Ode in
Italia," although there are, of course, in these languages,
studies of individual poets who wrote odes. We have, however,
two roughly complementary books on the English ode, Robert Shafer's
The English Ode to 1660 ( Princeton and London, 1918)
and George N. Shuster The English Ode from Milton to Keats
( New York, 1940). Although in my English chapter I am going
over the same period as Shafer (which was also surveyed by
Shuster), I am examining the ode from a different point of
view. Both Shafer and Shuster take the continental tradition
into account. Shafer, in particular, discusses some of the Italian
poets and Ronsard. However, neither of these two scholars
considers the English ode in the whole international humanist
context, as a typical Renaissance creation. Neither do they
make such detailed analyses of the English ode of the first half
of the seventeenth century as I have done in this work, an
analysis which has revealed the intimate relationship between
meaning and metre in the irregular ode as perfected by
Cowley.

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