Encomium
Quick answer: An encomium is a poem or speech of high praise for a person, thing, or idea. Learn what encomium means, its Greek origins, and how to write praise that convinces.
An encomium is a poem or formal speech written in high praise of a person, achievement, thing, or idea. The word comes from the Greek 'enkomion', the song performed for a victor during the 'komos', the celebratory procession after games or triumphs. Where a eulogy in modern usage praises the dead, an encomium happily praises the living, and it can just as well glorify an abstraction, a city, or a cheese.
Praise sounds easy and is not. Anyone can stack compliments; the encomium is the discipline of making admiration persuasive, specific, and worth hearing. Classical students were drilled in it as a rhetorical exercise, praising figures from myth to learn structure and proportion. For modern poets, the form is a gym for one underused muscle: celebrating something without irony and without going soft.
How It Works
Classical encomia followed a rough recipe: origins and background, upbringing, deeds and virtues, comparisons with others, and a closing exhortation to imitate the praised one. Modern poems loosen the scaffolding but keep the logic: praise must be argued, not asserted. The strongest move is always evidence, one deed or detail that makes the greatness visible.
An original micro-example, praising a grandmother's hands: 'Others inherited money. We inherited the sight of her hands folding dough at five in the morning, quick as two birds settling, feeding a street that never once said thank you.' The praise arrives as witnessed fact, with a comparison built in.
Where You Will See It
Pindar's victory odes for athletes at the Olympian and Pythian games are the founding monuments, praising boxers and charioteers by linking them to myth. The Renaissance loved the paradoxical encomium, praise of unworthy subjects, of which Erasmus's Praise of Folly is the famous prose case. In modern poetry the impulse survives in the ode: Pablo Neruda's odes praising socks, salt, and an onion are encomia in working clothes, and much contemporary praise poetry honours ordinary people history overlooked.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Choose a subject you can praise with a straight face, then earn every superlative with a particular. If you claim courage, show the morning it was exercised. Comparison is the form's secret engine: measured against what, better than whom? One honest limitation, acknowledged and outweighed, makes the rest of the praise believable.
Beware the greeting-card cadence. Praise that could apply to anyone praises no one. The test: could a stranger pick your subject out of a crowd from the poem alone? If yes, you have an encomium; if no, you have a compliment.
What poets can take from this
- Prove every superlative with one specific deed or detail.
- Use comparison: greatness needs something to be measured against.
- Admit one small flaw to make the larger praise credible.
- Try a paradoxical encomium, praising something humble or disliked.
- Cut any line that could describe someone other than your subject.
Try it yourself
Write an encomium for the least celebrated worker you have ever watched closely: a school cleaner, a bus conductor, a night nurse. Follow the old recipe loosely, origins, deeds, comparison, exhortation, but keep the language modern and concrete.
Questions
What is the difference between an encomium and a eulogy?
In current usage a eulogy is praise delivered for someone who has died, usually at a funeral. An encomium is praise regardless of occasion, and its subject is usually alive, or not a person at all.
Is an encomium the same as an ode?
They overlap but are not identical. An ode is a formal lyric of address that can carry many moods, including doubt. An encomium is defined by its purpose, sustained praise, whatever shape it takes. Pindar's victory odes are both at once.
What is a paradoxical encomium?
A witty subgenre that lavishes formal praise on trivial or disreputable subjects, from flies to folly to baldness. It flourished in classical rhetoric and the Renaissance, and it is still a delightful exercise for loosening an over-serious poem.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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