Pindarics (alternatively Pindariques or Pindaricks) 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.
[1] 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.
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.
John Milton employed 'pindarics' for the chorus of his lyrical tragedy, Samson Agonistes, published in 1670/71 (and probably composed in the 1660s) but he was a classical scholar and he termed them more appropriately: In antiquity, this looser form of choral song was associated with the tragic poet Euripides and other musical innovators of the late fifth-century bce, in contrast to the highly structured odes of the earlier tragedian Aeschylus.
Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852) may be considered another specimen of a pindaric in English literature,[1] as seen for example in the opening and closing lines: