Poems for Sports

The great Greek lyric poet Pindar is not only recognized for contributing the Pindaric ode to the poetic tradition, but also the epinicia, or triumphal ode, one of the earliest poems written in celebration of sport. Though the creation of the epinician ode is credited to Simonides of Ceos, Pindar was the forms greatest practitioner. These odes were written to honor a victor in one of the Hellenic games, and were intended to be sung in a procession for the winner, typically upon his return to his home city. Among his epinicia, Pindar wrote 14 "Olympian odes," in honor of victors in the ancient Olympics. These odes were syntactically complex, and usually connected the victor with a great hero of the past, such as Achilles. For example, in "For Hieron of Syracuse, Winner in the Horse-Race," written in honor of the eponymous competitors Olympic victory, Pindar wrote: ...of prizes in the games thou art fain, O my soul, to tell, then, as for no bright star more quickening than the sun must thou search in the void firmament by day, so neither shall we find any games greater than the Olympic whereof to utter our voice: for hence cometh the glorious hymn and entereth into the minds of the skilled in song, so that they celebrate the son of Kronos, when to the rich and happy hearth of Hieron they are come. Centuries later, Marianne Moore looked to sports--baseball in particular--for a sense of her cultures spirit. In her famed poem, "Baseball and Writing," Moore seeks correspondence between this still-young, rule-bound sport with the practice of writing, a good fit for the formally rigorous and exacting poet. She begins, "Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting / and baseball is like writing." Continuing in the rich tradition of American poems on the American Pastime, Donald Hall, who incidentally has written extensively on Moores verse, wrote the poem "Baseball" and included it in his book The Museum of Clear Ideas. Following a formal heuristic as complex as baseballs epic rulebook, the poem is comprised of twelve "innings" that are subdivided into nine stanzas of nine lines, each line containing nine syllables. Addressed to poet and musician Kurt Schwitters, famed for his collages, Hall's "Baseball" poem assembles like a collage itself. It brings together the totems and indelible images of baseballs storied history, such as Fenway Park, Astroturf, and Carlton Fisk, whose home run in the twelfth inning of game six of the 1975 World Series had been, until 2004's World Series victory, one of the few treasured moments in Red Sox history. Sports poems, especially those on baseball, can be found in numerous anthologies, websites, and occasionally even in the pages of magazines like Sports Illustrated. But these poems arent limited to high-profile sports like baseball or events such as the Olympics. In the following very abbreviated list, there are poems on fly-fishing, pick-up basketball, and boxing, among other sporting interests.

Moore, Marianne. "Poems for Sports." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, 1997. Web. 11 Feb. 2014. Lee, David. Shutterstock. Truste, 2003. Web. 11 Feb. 2014 Vadhof. "Shutterstock." Shutterstock.com. Truste, 2003. Web. 11 Feb. 2014.