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This article reappraises the Romantic ode through the concept of brinkmanship introduced by Edward Young in 1728 and revived and developed by Coleridge. Young portrays the Pindaric ode as a risk-taking genre which appears wild and “immethodical” but “has as much Logick at the bottom, as Aristotle, or Euclid.” Coleridge elaborates this poetic “logic” and makes the idea of opposed but harmonised mental forces part of his theory of imagination. His critical speculations illuminate his own ode-writing and that of other Romantic poets who use the genre self-reflexively, to test the limits of imagination and explore its workings. The article focuses on Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode” and Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” emphasising their imaginative audacity, their strategic deployment of Pindaric devices such as transitions, apostrophes and paradoxes, and their daring intertextuality. Aspects of Keats’s odes normally taken as signs of Horatian restraint are interpreted instead as distinctive displays of Pindaric brinkmanship.