The Slate Ode (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Osip Mandelstam
- First Published: 1928
- Type of Work: Ode
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry, Ode
- Subjects: Nature, Poetry or poets, Creative process, Time, Water, Geology or geologists, Night, Stone
The Poem
“The Slate Ode,” written in 1923, is one of Osip Mandelstam’s longer poems, consisting of nine stanzas of regular iambic tetrameter. That is the traditional Russian odic meter, although Mandelstam chooses an eight-line stanza over the more typical ten-line stanza. Calling his work an ode, Mandelstam is associating himself with the archaizing drive among Russian post-Symbolists, since the use of generic labels such as “ode” or “elegy” as a way of marking meaningful distinctions had been in decline since the 1830’s, along with the hierarchy of poetic...
[The entire page is 1414 words long]
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