by Ren Powell
Recently I was telling someone about the different genres of pre-Islamic poetry — one of them being the panegyric (a poem of praise). This person laughed and said, “Imagine writing a panegyric poem nowadays! You couldn’t do it unless it were satirical.”
I don’t agree. And I challenge you this week to write a panegyric poem.
You may remember one of the great American panegyric poems, Walt Whitman’s O Captain, My Captain! written for Abraham Lincoln. But the panegyric poem doesn’t need to be about a president or UN leader. Our community is so large these days and we have so many people who take the lead in different arenas, that we may want to praise a basketball player or even the local dentist.
The classical Arab panegyric usually borrows familiar phrases, sometimes from other poems, to make the poem more memorable or accessible. Feel free to borrow “sound bites” from the media.
Another common trait of the panegyric is to trace the hero’s journey. Maybe from birth to death, from birth to success, or from challenge to solution. Or break with tradition and write about the heroine’s journey! If your hero’s life comes to a tragic* end, be sure the poem includes his or her great contributions to society. Try not to just tell a sad story.
I should mention that the traditional Arab panegyric tends to spend quite a few lines on the “wild” days of the hero’s youth. Have fun!
*I am using the word tragic in the Aristotelian sense: a (wo)man’s best character trait causes his or her downfall. For example, determination to find the truth is a really good thing — unless you’re Oedipus and the truth is so horrible you want to poke your eyes out.
I learned a new word today — panegyric, “a poem of praise”.
Interesting that ‘pan’, the first root, can also mean “to harshly criticize”!
Words are fun.
Ha! I never thought about that. I wonder at what point looking at the whole picture became a bad thing…
And speaking of “looking at the whole picture,” there’s PANoramic as a word.
Like Philip, I took learned a new word today–”panegyric.” It kinda rolls off the tongue.
I wonder if the word ‘panegyric’ can be extended to poems written to inanimate objects? I have W H Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’ in mind.
Yes, but not in the Arabic qasida (I’m not sure about the Urdu or Persian).
I’ve never read “In Praise of a Limestone” – thanks for the heads-up on that: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-praise-of-limestone/