The British ode, perhaps even more than the British epic, follows an approximate pattern – discovery of the past, absorption of what is of value for a different modern culture, and rejection of what is useless or pernicious. In the case of the ode, especially the “great ode,” however, the chief progenitor is native rather than classical. Greek Pindar was little known in 1656 when Cowley's versions of him flamed upon the world; they started a conflagration that was not extinguished until after the different but cognate nominally Romantic odes. The eighteenth century has too often been thought an age of prose or, at best, one in which the lyric emerges only in its later pre-Romantic years or, in Northrop Frye's influential term, during the age of sensibility. Actually, the eighteenth-century lyric moment lasts for about 150 years.

Cowley could be so successful in adapting Pindar for some of the same reasons that Pope was successful in adapting Homer – the medley of ancient Greek reputation and modern British needs. On balance, Pindar's classical values and forms, but not his energy and spirit, were alien to modern British practice. Since classical theology was irrelevant, most eighteenth-century readers denied the power of the odes' key device of linking man to god. Since the celebration of boxers, wrestlers, or jockeys seemed inherently unheroic, those readers also denied the power of Pindar's subject – indeed of Pindar himself, whose uncertain sexual morality and apparent willingness to write on minor subjects for major sums was, surely, unknown to virtuous eighteenth-century poets.