Besides establishing the autonomy of literature, Romanticism also witnessed the culmination of a different kind of literary liberation – one that engaged in politics rather than withdrawing from it. This is what the poetic license of Pindar, the ‘prince of poets,’ had represented since the English Civil War. For close to two hundred years poetry would emulate his vast, unfettered lines (numeri lege solution's) in an attempt both to bestow and to withdraw the authority of the reigning sovereign. From Cowley and Dryden to Coleridge and Shelley, Pindaric odes were thus able to address fundamental issues of policy such as privilege and subversion, arbitrary power and the rule of law, liberty and legitimacy, revolutionary upheaval and constitutional order. What is more, these issues were negotiated in the metrical irregularities licensed by the unruly form. By suspending the laws of versification, the emergent greater irregular ode claimed a sovereignty of its own.