Ode

Genre (French for 'kind, sort') is any style or form of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, based on some set of stylistic criteria, as in literary genres, film genres, music genres, comics genres, etc. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility. The proper use of a specific genre is important for a successful transfer of information (media-adequacy).

Critical discussion of genre perhaps began with a classification system for ancient Greek literature, as set out in Aristotle's Poetics. For Aristotle, poetry (odes, epics, etc.), prose, and performance each had specific features that supported appropriate content of each genre. Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, for example, and even actors were restricted to their genre under the assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best.The academic discipline about genres is called genre studies (or genre theory).

A strophe (/ˈstroʊfiː/) is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. The term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line length. Strophic poetry is to be contrasted with poems composed line-by-line non-stanzaically, such as Greek epic poems or English blank verse, to which the term stichic applies.

In its original Greek setting, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the music", as John Milton wrote in the preface to Samson Agonistes, with the strophe chanted by a Greek chorus as it moved from right to left across the scene.

Antistrophe (Ancient Greek: ἀντιστροφή, "a turning back") is the portion of an ode sung by the chorus in its returning movement from west to east in response to the strophe, which was sung from east to west.

According to one meaning of the word, an epode is the third part of an ancient Greek choral ode that follows the strophe and the antistrophe and completes the movement.

The word epode is also used to refer to the second, shorter line of a two-line stanza of the kind composed by Archilochus and Hipponax in which the first line consists of a dactylic hexameter or an iambic trimeter. (See Archilochian.) It can also be used (as in Horace's Epodes) to refer to poems written in such stanzas.

The Taiping Yulan, translated as the Imperial Reader or Readings of the Taiping Era, is a massive Chinese leishu encyclopedia compiled by a team of scholars from 977 to 983. It was commissioned by the imperial court of the Song dynasty during the first era of the reign of Emperor Taizong. It is divided into 1,000 volumes and 55 sections, which consisted of about 4.7 million Chinese characters. It included citations from about 2,579 different kinds of documents spanning from books, poetry, odes, proverbs, steles to miscellaneous works. After its completion, the Emperor Taizong is said to have finished reading it within a year, going through 3 volumes per day. It is considered one of the Four Great Books of Song.

The team who compiled the Taiping Yulan includes: Tang Yue (湯悅), Zhang Wei (張洎), Xu Xuan (徐鉉), Song Bai (宋白), Xu Yongbin (徐用賓), Chen E (陳鄂), Wu Shu (吳淑), Shu Ya (舒雅), Lü Wenzhong (吕文仲), Ruan Sidao (阮思道), Hu Meng (扈蒙), Li Fang (李昉), and others.

The epinikion or epinicion (pl.: epinikia or epinicia, Greek ἐπινίκιον, from epi-, "on" and nikê, "victory") is a genre of occasional poetry also known in English as a victory ode. In ancient Greece, the epinikion most often took the form of a choral lyric, commissioned for and performed at the celebration of an athletic victory in the Panhellenic Games and sometimes in honor of a victory in war. Major poets in the genre are Simonides, Bacchylides, and Pindar.

The Odes (Latin: Carmina) are a collection in four books of Latin lyric poems by Horace. The Horatian ode format and style has been emulated since by other poets. Books 1 to 3 were published in 23 BC. A fourth book, consisting of 15 poems, was published in 13 BC.

The Odes were developed as a conscious imitation of the short lyric poetry of Greek originals – Pindar, Sappho and Alcaeus are some of Horace's models. His genius lay in applying these older forms to the social life of Rome in the age of Augustus. The Odes cover a range of subjects – love; friendship; wine; religion; morality; patriotism; poems of eulogy addressed to Augustus and his relations; and verses written on a miscellany of subjects and incidents, including the uncertainty of life, the cultivation of tranquility and contentment, and the observance of moderation or the "golden mean."

Prosodion (Greek: προσόδιον) in ancient Greece was a processional song to the altar of a deity, mainly Apollo or Artemis, sung ritually before the Paean hymn. It is one of the earliest musical types used by the Greeks. The prosodion was accompanied by the aulos, whereas the associated paean (performed while standing) was accompanied by the kithara. Prosodia were composed by Alcman, Pindar, Simonides of Ceos, Bacchylides, Eumelus of Corinth, and Limenius (whose prosodion follows its paean, rather than preceding it), as well the various winners in art competitions (Mouseia). The etymology of the word is related to ὁδός hodos road and not with ᾠδή ôidê song. According to Soterichus, the music of the prosodia by Alcman, Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides was written in the Dorian tonos "because of its grandeur and dignity". The only complete surviving prosodion (part of the Second Delphic Hymn by Limenius), however, is composed in the Lydian tonos.