Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Revivals do well by revolutions. For legitimacy, persuasiveness, and sheer force, movements of political or cultural innovation wisely turn to the distant past in order to move behind the present state of affairs and its oppressive hold on the popular imagination. It is unsurprising, therefore, but no less striking, that one of the primary literary proponents of the Terror and the quasi-official poet of the National Convention, Ponce-Denis Écouchard-Lebrun, was referred to publicly as Lebrun-Pindare. The intention, no doubt, was to ascribe to the modern poet's chants républicains all the freedom, abruptness, and even violence associated with the archaic Greek dithyrambs. “The name of Pindar,” as Diderot had defined it for the Encyclopédie , “is nothing more than … the name for enthusiasm itself” ( Diderot 1876 : 293). Nonetheless, as a writer of odes, Lebrun was adopting a form that had come to represent, especially in France, the most academically overburdened and politically conservative of literary genres. Indeed, to revive the ode at this point in history required a resuscitation of that which ostensibly had been dead for quite some time. The difficulty of the task proved to be proportionate to the splendor of the accomplishment, whose consequences would move far beyond the immediate political application. Over the course of this stunning project, together with analogous ... log in or subscribe to read full text