This doctoral project aims to produce a revisionist, genre-theoretical history of the eighteenth-century ode in Britain. Promoting an inclusive, quantitative as well as qualitative examination of canonic and non-canonic authors’ productions, the project seeks to offer a nuanced account of the range and variety of the genre, its engagement with literary tradition, class, and gender, and its place in the burgeoning publishing industry with its proliferating market for printed poetry. The project will interrogate some of the central assumptions that have characterized 20th-century work on the ode and correct misconceptions in the conceptualization of the form. Above all, it aims to contextualize the ode’s generic hybridity in relation to such other genres as the loco-descriptive poem and the long poem. In so doing, it aims to provide a better understanding of the various types as well as contexts of production and consumption that define eighteenth-century British poetry at large.