DITHYRAMBIC POETRY, the description of poetry in which the character of the dithyramb is preserved. It remains quite uncertain what the derivation or even the primitive mean ing of the Greek word 6L0bpayr3os is. It was, however, connected from earliest times with the choral worship of Dionysus. The earliest dithyrambic poetry was probably improvised by priests of Dionysus at solemn feasts and expressed, in disordered num bers, the excitement and frenzy felt by the worshippers. The dithyramb was traditionally first practised in Naxos; it spread to other islands, to Boeotia and finally to Athens. Arion is said to have introduced it at Corinth, and to have allied it to the wor ship of Pan. It was thus "merged," as Prof essor Gilbert Murray says, "into the Satyr-choir of wild mountain-goats" out of which sprang the earliest form of tragedy. It flourished in Athens until after the age of Aristotle. So far as we can distinguish the form of the ancient Greek dithyramb, it must have been a kind of ir regular wild poetry, not divided into strophes or constructed with any evolution of the theme. It was accompanied on some occa sions by flutes, on others by the lyre. Pindar, in whose hands the ode took such magnificent completeness, is said to have been trained in the elements of dithyrambic poetry by Lasus of Her mione. In the opinion of antiquity, pure dithyrambic poetry reached its climax in a lost poem, The Cyclops, by Philoxenus of Cythera, a poet of the 4th century B.C. In modern literature, al though the adjective "dithyrambic" is often used to describe an enthusiastic movement in lyric language, and particularly in the ode, pure dithyrambs have been extremely rare. The Baccho in Toscana of Francesco Redi (1626-98), which was translated from the Italian, with admirable skill, by Leigh Hunt, is a piece of genuine dithyrambic poetry. Alexander's Feast (1698), by Dryden, is the best example in English. But perhaps more re markable, and more genuinely dithyrambic than either, are the astonishing improvisations of Karl Mikael Bellman whose Bacchic songs form one of the most remarkable bodies of lyrical poetry in the literature of Sweden.