Entertainment / Literature / Palinode: Singing again): A poem, song, or section of a poem or song in which the poet renounces or retracts his words in an earlier work. Usually this is meant to apologize or counterbalance earlier material. The first recorded use of the palinode is a lyric written by the Greek author Stesichorus (7th century BCE), in which he retracts his earlier statement claiming that the Trojan War was entirely Helen's fault. Ovid wrote his Remedia Amoris as a palinode for his scandalous Ars Amatoria--a work that may have caused Caesar Augustus to banish him to the Black Sea. As a theme, the palinode is especially common in religious poetry and love poetry. The use of the palinode became conventional in patristic and medieval writings--as evidenced in Augustine, Bede, Giraldus Cambrensis, Jean de Meun, Sir Lewis Clifford, and others. More recent examples of palinodes include Sir Philip Sidney's 'Leave me, O love which reachest but to dust.' Here, his palinode renounces the poetry of sexual love for that of divine grace. Likewise, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women includes a palinode in which the author 'takes back' what he said about unfaithful women like Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde. At the end of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer goes so far as to write a retraction for all his secular literature. See also retraction. (Greek
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