The Spirit of Classical Hymn in Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"

The only classical hymns that survive before the year 400 BC are ascribed to Homer; Shelley translated seven of these between 1817 and 1820. The thirty-three extant Homeric Hymns are hexameter oral compositions that were preserved later in writing. There is "little firm knowledge about the circumstances surrounding [their] composition and performance," but critics generally agree that the hymns were presented at public feasts, festivals, and religious occasions (Clay 6-7). Thucydides refers to the Homeric "Hymn to Apollo" as a prelude, which would have been chanted by a rhapsode before an epic recitation, and a number of the Homeric Hymns presumably served such a function (Evelyn-White xxxiv). Although they range in length from a handful of lines to several hundred, and address numerous divinities, the Homeric Hymns share recognizable linguistic and superstructural features that organize the works and establish a distinct generic repertoire.(3) They are predominantly narrative pieces with subsidiary lyric sections. They appear in a linear sequence of parts: exordium, exposition, and peroration. A firm decorum of subject relates the hymns to the actions and attributes of the Olympian gods. The hymns presuppose a special stylistic attitude of inferior to superior, particularly of supplicant to deity. They follow an interlaced or discontinuous pattern of action. Their epideictic, elaborate, and elevated rhetorical style is fitting for the honoring of gods. Most of these features "are not discrete aspects but function together in the poetic context with other characteristics" (Rollinson 22). Of course, there is nothing like exact equivalence from hymn to hymn. The great disparity merely between the length of the Homeric hymns "To Zeus" and "To Hermes" precludes any one-to-one correspondence. Nevertheless, there is a kinship about the Homeric Hymns and a sequence of influence and imitation that proceed from them to the hymns of Callimachus, Cleanthes, and the Roman Emperor Julian, all the way to Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." This tradition connects the works generically while allowing wide variation.

Philip Rollinson outlines the tripartite structure of exordium, exposition, and peroration introduced in the Homeric Hymns and shows that it is among the most pervasive and influential characteristics in subsequent classical hymns (16). The Homeric Hymns generally begin with an exordium, which includes an invocation and often an apostrophe to the god praised, proceed to an exposition describing some of the deity's basic attributes or acts, and close with a perorational prayer or salutation to that deity. Even the shorter Homeric Hymns tend to follow this pattern, as the hymn "To Hephaestus" illustrates:

Sing, clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaestus famed for inventions. With bright-eyed Athene he taught men glorious crafts throughout the world, - men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts. But now that they have learned crafts through Hephaestus the famed worker, easily they live a peaceful life in their own houses the whole year round.