Anacreontics are verses in a metre used by the Greek poet Anacreon in his poems dealing with love and wine. His later Greek imitators took up the same themes and used the Anacreontic meter. In modern poetry, Anacreontics are short lyrical pieces that keep the Anacreontic subject matter but not the metre.
The Anacreonticverse or anacreonteus is the eight-syllable line u u – u – u – –. It has been suggested that the anacreontic in its origin may be an "anaclastic" variant of the Ionic dimeter, i.e. an ionic dimeter with the 4th and 5th syllables reversed; but whether this is so or not, the two meters have been associated since Anacreon, who often used them together in compositions. One example of anacreontics from the corpus of Anacreon is fr. 11b PMG, which ends as follows: In this extract, the first four lines are anacreontics, while the last is an ionic dimeter.
English Anacreontics
In English poetry, Anacreontics are the title given to short lyrical pieces, of an easy kind, dealing with love and wine. The English word appears to have been first used in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who called a section of his poems "anacreontiques" because they were paraphrased out of the so-called writings of Anacreon into a familiar measure which was supposed to represent the meter of the Greek. Half a century later, when the form had been much cultivated, John Phillipslaid down the arbitrary rule that an anacreontic line "consists of seven syllables, without being tied to any certain law of quantity." In the 18th century, the antiquary William Oldys was the author of a little piece which is the perfect type of an anacreontic; this begins: In 1800Thomas Moore published a collection of erotic anacreontics which are also typical in form; Moorespeaks of the necessity of catching "the careless facility with which Anacreon appears to have trifled," as a reason why anacreontics are often tame and worthless. He dwells, moreover, on the absurdity of writing "pious anacreontics," a feat, however, which was performed by several of the Greek Christian poets, and in particular by Gregory of Nazianzus and John of Damascus.
