Palinode

A palinode is a poem in which the poet retracts, i.e., takes back as false or unjustified, a claim or claims made in an earlier poem. Very occasionally, the word palinode is used in an extended sense to refer to any speech or writing in which the author retracts or recants an earlier claim.

The first and most famous palinode in western literature was composed in the seventh century BCE by the Greek lyric poet Stesichorus (?630-?555 BCE). Stesichorus had written a poem, Helen, in which he told, as Homer had done, how the beautiful Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, eloped to Troy with Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, and thus became the cause of the ten-year-long Trojan War between the Greeks and the Trojans. After writing the poem, however, Stesichorus went blind and, believing that his blindness was a punishment by the gods for his defamation of Helen, he then wrote a second poem in which he denied that Helen ever left Sparta - after which his sight was restored. Neither of Stesichorus' poems has survived in its entirety, but the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE) refers to Stesichorus and quotes three lines of his palinode in his dialogue Phaedrus (243a-b):

When Stesichorus lost his sight because of his defamation of Helen, he was not ... at a loss to know why. As a true artist he understood the reason, and promptly wrote the lines:

This tale is not true.

You never sailed in the well-decked ships

Nor came to the towers of Troy.

And after finishing the composition of his so-called palinode he immediately recovered his sight.

The English word palinode comes from the Greek παλινῳδία (palinodia), which is a compound of the two words πάλιν (palin, back, backwards, again) and ᾠδή (ode, song or ode) and thus literally means a singing back or a singing again. The Greek word παλινῳδία, however, is used much more often than the English palinode to refer to a retraction or recantation of any kind. (Plato, e.g., so uses it later in the Phaedrus at 257a.)

Don't confuse palinode with palindrome