The experience of poetry: from homer’s listeners to shakespeare’s readers derek attridge all chapter
The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers Derek Attridge
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For Suzanne, Laura, and Eva
Preface
Twenty years ago, struck by the flowering of poetry in live performances, I began a project for which the Leverhulme Trust—to which I remain deeply indebted— granted me a Research Professorship. In spite of frequent pronouncements that poetry was a dying art, I felt, as I still do, that in some ways it has never been so visibly present in Western culture; what has been lost, perhaps, is a widely shared awareness of its historical achievements. An examination of the continuities and changes in the modes of performing and experiencing poetry, and the forerunners of poetry, from the Homeric epics to the English Renaissance presented itself as one way to highlight the richness and longevity of the tradition we have inherited.
I didn’t foresee that my work on this project would repeatedly be interrupted by the desire to write what seemed like more pressing books, and that it would be two decades before I could submit the finished manuscript. This milestone would probably never have been reached at all had it not been for several spells of uninterrupted research with access to outstanding library resources: a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford; a Christensen Visiting Fellowship at St Catherine’s College, Oxford; and two Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina. My warm thanks go to all the individuals in these institutions who made my stays so productive and enjoyable.
The debts one incurs to colleagues and students over a period this long are far too many and varied to be fully recorded here, especially as the larger part of the book involved straying into territory in which I was far from expert. The following are some of the people who freely shared their deep knowledge of the different periods covered by this book, many of whom kindly read portions of the draft: for Ancient Greece: Lowell Edmunds, Robert Fowler, Simon Goldhill, Simon Hornblower, Stephen Minta, Peter Parsons, and Martin West; for Ancient Rome: Stephen Harrison, Llewellyn Morgan, and Hannah Sullivan; for Late Antiquity: George Woudhuysen; for the Middle Ages: Thomas Cable, Michele Campopiano, Kathleen Davis, Nick Havely, Nicola McDonald, and Matthew Townend; for the Renaissance: Colin Burrow, Jane Everson, Jane Griffiths, Richard Rowland, Jason Scott-Warren, Bill Sherman, Helen Smith, Adam Smyth, Bart van Es, and Blake Wilson. More generally, I have had many instructive discussions about the experience of poetry with, among others, Thomas Carper, Jonathan Culler, Martin Duffell, Tom Furniss, Francesco Giusti, Adam Kelly, Don Paterson, Yopie Prins, Henry Staten, and (again) Hannah Sullivan. Michael Springer’s help in checking quotations and references was invaluable. The five anonymous readers for Oxford University Press read the entire manuscript with exemplary care and provided extraordinarily helpful reports, and my editor, Jacqueline Norton, was a wise and enthusiastic backer of the project from the beginning. To all these, and the many more whose insights and support I benefited from but don’t have space to name, my warmest thanks.
The writing of this book has coincided with my time in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, which afforded as stimulating and supportive a human and institutional environment as I could have wished for. The Department’s Leavis Fund made a generous contribution to the cost of the illustrations. My family, as always, have good-humouredly put up with the never-ending demands my work has made on their lives; for providing twenty years of companionship, encouragement, and entertainment during its making, this book is dedicated to them.
PART I. A NCIENT GREECE
1. Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers
2. Archaic to Classical Greece: Festivals and Rhapsodes
3. Classical Greece to Ptolemaic Alexandria: Writers and Readers
PART II. A NCIENT ROME AND LATE ANTIQUITY
4. Ancient Rome: The Republic and the Augustan Age
5. Ancient Rome: The Empire after Augustus
6. Late Antiquity: Latin and Greek, Private, Public, Popular
PART III. T HE MIDDLE AGES
7. Early Medieval Poetry: Vernacular Versifying
8. The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Performing Genres
9. Lyric, Romance, and Alliterative Verse in Fourteenth-Century England
10. Chaucer, Gower, and Fifteenth-Century Poetry in English
PART IV. T HE ENGLISH
11. Early Tudor Poetry: Courtliness and Print
12. Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry: The Circulation of Verse
13. Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry: The Idea of the Poet
List of Illustrations
1.1 Nestor’s Cup, 750–700 bc. Museo Archeologico di Pithecusae, Lacco Ameno, Ischia. Adam Eastland Art + Architecture/Alamy Stock Photo. 15
1.2 Cretan Geometric bronze figure of a lyre-player, 900–800 bc. Heraklion Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports-Archaeological Receipts Fund.
27
2.1 Rhapsode (?) and auditors; black-figure Panathenaic prize-amphora, c.540 bc. National Museums Liverpool, 56.19.18. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Museums Liverpool. 42
2. 2 Rhapsode and auditors; black-figure Panathenaic prize-amphora, 520–500 bc. Oldenburg Stadtmuseum, ad-13.B. Reproduced by kind permission of Stadtmuseum Oldenburg/A. Gradetchliev. 43
2.3 Rhapsode reciting a poem; red-figure neck-amphora, the Kleophrades Painter, Athens, 490–480 bc. British Museum, ID 00221978001. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. 44
3.2 Boy preparing for recitation; red-figure Attic cup fragment, Akestorides Painter, 470–450 bc. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Object no. 86.AE.324. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
57
59
3.3 Man reading from a roll; red-figure Attic vase, c.500 bc. Berlin Antikenmuseen ARV2, 431.48, 1653; Beazley Addenda 2, 237. bpk/Antikensammlung, SMB/ Johannes Laurentius. 61
3.4 Woman reading from a roll; red-figure Attic hydria, Kimissalla, c.450 bc. British Museum, ID 00400574001. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. 62
3.5 Timotheus of Miletus, The Persians, verses 193–247, 350–300 bc. Berlin, Ägyptisches Museum, Papyrus 9875. 63
3.6 Young girl reading, Roman bronze statuette after a Hellenistic model, ad 50–100. Cabinet des Médailles, Paris. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ID/Cote: Bronze-1046. 67
4.1 Fresco from Pompeii, woman holding writing implements, ad 55–79. National Archaeological Museum of Naples, 14842101892. Reproduced by kind permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. 90
4.2 Part of P. Herc 817, unknown author, Carmen de Bello Actiaco, 50 bc–ad 10. Reproduced by kind permission of the Biblioteca Nazionale ‘Vittorio Emanuele III’, Napoli. Foto di Giorgio Di Dato. 95
List of Illustrations
5.1 Fragment of tombstone, ad 43–410. Yorkshire Museum, York, object no. YORYM: 2007.6171. Reproduced by kind permission of the York Museums Trust. 121
6.1 Codex Sinaiticus, written in the mid-fourth century. British Library Add. 43725. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 124
6.2 Optatian, poem 18, ad 300–350. Reproduced by kind permission of Michael Squire and Johannes Wienand from their book Morphogrammata/The Lettered Art of Optatian: (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017). 127
7.1 Gallehus horn, ad 400–430. Moesgaard Museum. Replica based on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drawings. Reproduced by kind permission of Rógvi N. Johansen, Foto/medie Moesgaard. 150
7.2 St Jerome, Epistola ad Ctesiphontem, 850–900. Abbey Library of Saint Gall, Cod. Sang. 132, p. 1. Reproduced by kind permission of the St. Gallen Stiftsbibliothek. 152
7.3 Caedmon’s Hymn in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, early to mid-eighth century. Cambridge University Library Kk.5.16, fol. 128v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.
156
7.4 St Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah, containing Bede’s ‘Death song’, c.860. Abbey Library of Saint Gall, Cod. Sang. 254, p. 253. Reproduced by kind permission of the St. Gallen Stiftsbibliothek. 157
7.5 Genesis B, c.ad 1000. Bodleian MS. Junius 11, p. 21. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 161
7.6 Alfred the Great, Pastoral Care, metrical epilogue, ad 890–97. Bodleian Hatton 20, fol. 98v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 164
8.1 An opening of the Oxford Manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, c.1150. Bodleian MS. Digby 23 pt. 2, fol. 044v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 179
8.2 The Owl and the Nightingale, 1250–1300. British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix., fol. 233r. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 204
9.1 First page of Sir Orfeo, c.1330. National Library of Scotland, Auchinleck Manuscript, fol. 300ra. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Library of Scotland. 210
9.2 Sir Bevis of Hampton in graphic tail-rhyme, c.1400. British Library, MS Egerton 2862, fol. 45r. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 217
9.3 A wayle whyt as whalles bon (with the ending of Most I ryden by Rybbesdale), c.1300–1350. British Library Harley MS 2253, f. 67r. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 219
10.1 Chaucer, frontispiece of Troilus and Criseyde, 1385–1413. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 61, fol. 1v. Reproduced by kind permission of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
230
10.2 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c.1410. British Library MS Lansdowne 851, fol. 2, detail. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 231
10.3 Chaucer, Sir Thopas and Melibee, 1450–1460. Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 223, fol. 183r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 247
10.4 Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, 1460–1483. British Library MS Harley 2251, fol. 142. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 248
11.1 Chaucer’s Knight in Caxton’s second edition of The Canterbury Tales, 1483. British Library G.11586, fol. 3v. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 261
11.2 Skelton, ‘A Lawd and Praise’, c.1509. National Archives E 36/228 (7). Reproduced by kind permission of The National Archives. 266
11.3 ‘Suffrying in sorow’, in the Devonshire Manuscript (mostly 1530s). British Library Add MS 17492, fol. 6v–7r. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board.
272
12.1 The Great Picture Triptych, attributed to Jan van Belcamp, 1646. Reproduced by kind permission of the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Lakeland Arts, Kendal, Cumbria. 292
12.2 Frontispiece and title-page of Ben Jonson’s Works, 1616. Bodleian Douce I 302. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 302
12.3 John Bodenham, Bel-vedére, 1600, p. 223. Bodleian Douce B 51. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 305
12.4 Title-page of Speght’s Chaucer, 1598. Bodleian Vet A1c.13. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
307
13.1 Title page of George Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, 1608. British Library C.34.I.8. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 334
Note
Except where otherwise indicated, classical texts are taken from the invaluable Loeb editions; I have also used their English translations of prose texts with minimal alteration. Translations of Greek and Latin poetry are my own, though I have drawn heavily (in the case of Greek, almost entirely) on published versions. I have not cited the original Greek, and the original Latin except when to do so seemed essential for the discussion. My apologies to those readers who know these languages and regret these omissions.
Medieval and Renaissance texts are given in the original language and, except for most Middle and Early Modern English examples, in English translation. Again, I have drawn freely on published translations.
I have lightly modernized medieval and Renaissance English spelling, especially the use of thorn, the u/v and i/j distinctions, and abbreviations. Many of the original printed texts cited are to be found in Early English Books Online, another invaluable resource.
I have preferred the abbreviations bc and ad because of their greater familiarity, although I am sympathetic to the use of bce and ce as more neutral alternatives.
Introduction •
POETRY AS EXPERIENCE
What is a poem’s mode of existence? Take one of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, for example:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears: She seem’d a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Does this poem exist as the printed block of words on the page above? Is it the vocal realization of those words, whether by human or machine? Does it enjoy some ideal existence that every visible or audible manifestation of these words alludes to—a type of which this is a token, to use philosophical language?
Our habitual use of the word ‘poem’ has elements of all these conceptions. But if I say, ‘I enjoy Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems’, I’m referring to my experience of the works, and not just their words; if I comment that ‘Tennyson’s poetry leaves me cold’ (although I wouldn’t), I’m probably summing up several such experiences. These experiences are temporal, affective, and bodily. Words on the page or the screen—let’s call them, as material objects, texts—need to be experienced as a particular kind of event before they become, in the fullest sense of the term, poems. Even sound-waves travelling through the air remain purely physical phenomena if they are not received by a human ear and brain. (A computer could presumably be programmed to distinguish spoken poems from other utterances and perhaps to register in some way their emotional content, but the day has not yet arrived when it can experience poems as poems.) The poem is a human event, repeatable though never exactly the same in its repetitions, rather than a fixed material object, or even an ideal one.
But is there anything, it might be asked, that distinguishes the particular category of the poem from the more general category of literature? Isn’t any literary work an event that occurs when a suitable text, inert on the page, is read in a certain way?1
Poetry, like prose fiction and drama, can exploit any of the powers of which language is capable, whether to appal, to hearten, to intrigue, to browbeat, to stir, to excite, to disappoint—the list is endless. What poetry uniquely does, however, is to achieve this emotional and intellectual intensity by harnessing the particular effectiveness that language possesses by virtue of its physical properties: its sounds, its silences, its rhythms, its syntactic sequencing, its movement through time. Meaning in a poem is something that happens, it’s not a conceptual system or entity. Language’s manifold powers are made even stronger in this way, and the staging of linguistic acts are given even greater emotional resonance. A poem, therefore, is a real-time event, and if one does not read it in real time—aloud or in a mental representation of speech—one may be reading it as a literary work of some kind but not as a poem. To experience a poem as a poem, therefore, is not to treat it only as an event of meaning, but as an event of and in language, with language understood as a material medium as well as a semantic resource. And because this experience is a response to the materiality of language, the physical body is necessarily involved; even a silent reading in which the words are articulated will make use of slight muscular movements.2
The conditions under which poetry can be experienced are highly varied. I can attend a public reading, hear a poem on the radio, read silently or aloud from the printed page, or recite some lines of verse from memory. And what I derive from the experience can include knowledge of the past, moral advice, insight into a writer’s life, psychological truths, and much more. But when a poem is enjoyed purely for the information or wisdom it contains—and there is no lack of evidence that this frequently happened in medieval and Renaissance times, as it no doubt did in earlier periods as well—it is not being experienced as a poem.3 Poetry has been read for many other purposes too: it has, for instance, consoled mourners, injured opponents, contributed to social cohesion, reinforced the authority of rulers, and stiffened hearts before battle.
The question that this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles, poetry—or a cultural practice we would now call poetry—has, across the times and places here examined, continuously afforded the peculiarly pleasurable experience I have described. Was the enjoyment of language’s powers to move and delight part of the pleasure felt by those who listened to the Homeric epics in archaic Greece, or attended performances by Roman poets, or sang early Christian hymns, or heard tales in verse during medieval pilgrimages, or read silently from Renaissance anthologies? The choice of verse as the vehicle for so many social and political functions suggests that it works on its hearers and readers with peculiar force: has this force always stemmed from the pleasure to be gained from an exploitation of language’s properties as a material, temporal medium? And how does the experience of the writer relate to the experience of the performer, the hearer, or the reader? It has become something of a dogma that our modern understanding of the purpose and power of poetry, the manner in which we enjoy and value it today, is a product of the cultural revolution we call Romanticism, and that it is an anachronism to apply the same terms to the verse of the eighteenth century and before. The chapters that follow test this assumption.
This understanding of a poem as the experience of a real-time event in which the text’s utilization of the resources of the language comes to life means that the modes of poetic performance that occurred at various times in cultural history—public recitation, silent reading, reading aloud, and so on—are important in gauging the role and function of poetry at successive stages in European history. (Even the solitary reader sitting with a book of poems is, I have argued elsewhere, performing them.) One feature of verse that is central to its hearers’ and readers’ experience throughout this period is its metrical form, and we can gain valuable insights from a study of the changing ways in which the rhythms of language—often a reflection of changes in the language itself—are handled by writers.
Although what these pages offer is largely a historical account of cultural practices, using whatever evidence is available to chart the behaviour of those engaged in the transmission and reception of poetry, it has at its heart this understanding of poetry, and is intended to clarify and deepen what we might mean by speaking of ‘the experience of a poem’. In using the term ‘experience’, however, I am not implying a focus on psychological interiority: what actually went on in the minds and bodies of those who heard or read poetry remains inaccessible, and comments on inner feelings in response to poems are few and far between in these periods—and likely to be governed by prevailing conventions of what it is appropriate to say as much as by accurate reflection. My interest, rather, is in the material practices whereby poetry was communicated to an audience or a readership. Under what conditions was poetry performed to audiences? What did it sound like? How did it appear on the papyrus roll or the parchment codex? Who had access to poetry on the page? How did the invention of printing affect its reception? In looking for answers to these and similar questions, we will be tracing a history of change but also of continuity across two-and-a-half millennia.
THE HISTORY OF POETIC EXPERIENCE
The account I have just given, to be strictly accurate, is an account of what we might call poeticity: that dimension of the experience of literary works that is most obvious in poetry but that can occur in all genres—not necessarily even formal literary g enres—when called forth by the reader or listener. My interest in this book is in the creation and reception of linguistic compositions with a high degree of poeticity; I focus, that is, on works whose cultural function and capacity to please and move a reader or hearer depend on their finding in the sounds, rhythms, and temporal ordering of a language a resource to be exploited. These works have gone by different names at different times, though the word we use today goes back at least to Ancient Greece in the fourth century bc ; in its most literal sense, Greek poēma or poiēma meant ‘a thing made’, and the Latin poema was applied, the OED tells us, not only to poetical works in the modern sense but to ‘prose of poetic quality’—to texts displaying poeticit y, in short. My concern, however, is not with the use of the specific word, but with the existence in Western culture of the practices we identify by means of it.
‘Western culture’ is admittedly a problematic concept, but one that relies on a widely accepted story I am not about to challenge. Its foundations were laid in
Ancient Greece, whose culture was of course in part an inheritance from such older civilizations as the Phoenician, the Mycenaean, and the Egyptian; Ancient Rome built on these foundations; Graeco-Roman culture was then both tested and renewed by migrations from the north, resulting in a number of national cultures all still bearing traces of their ancient origins. My traversal of this terrain is necessarily selective; for instance, I focus on Alexandria rather than on any of the other Greek-speaking cultural centres of the Macedonian Empire because of its centrality in the transmission of archaic Greek poetry to post-classical Europe, and I devote only a few pages to Byzantine culture since it was less central to this process, even though its poetic heritage is a rich and complex one. Part of the narrative is the rise of Christianity, which will feature in my study to the extent that it had an impact on the experience of poetry; another part is the preservation of ancient European culture in the Arab world, a hugely important episode which will be acknowledged only by implication. And within this selective account, I focus on those poets or other writers whose work is most useful in revealing performance practices and their reception.
The trajectory I trace, in bare outline, moves from the poem as oral, composed in performance, and inseparable from song to the poem as printed, encountered in a book, and read silently—that is, to the experience of poetry that is most familiar today (though with the increasing use of electronic media this state of affairs may be changing). I take as emblematic of the modern condition of poetry the 1616 publication by Ben Jonson of his Works in a handsome folio edition—an event that, in the view of one commentator, marks the beginning of the dominance of print over manuscript and in doing so ushers in a new era in literary history.4 I thus adopt as an end-point from which the book looks back across twenty-four centuries the remarkable poetic achievement of Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. While the narrative travels from Greece and Alexandria to the Roman Empire and thence to works produced in several European vernaculars, the focus narrows in the fourteenth century to poetry in English, a body of work heavily dependent on the rich inheritance of these earlier cultures. The English Renaissance, the subject of the final chapters, also draws heavily on the European cultural past, and, in its fascination with Ancient Greece and Rome, closes the circle. A different study could have taken a different European language, or a different period, as the culmination of an account of Western poetry; all I claim is that the poems of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and their contemporaries mark a high point in the long story of the transformation of language itself into a richly rewarding art-form and that their achievement coincides with a decisive shift in the experience of poetry of which we are still the beneficiaries.
The English cultural scene also provides a vivid instance of the changing relations between poetry, understood as an independent art-form, and verse drama. The interest in the final chapters lies as much in what is missing as in what is attested: in spite of frequent claims that in Elizabethan England it would have been common to hear poetry being performed in the hall or the tavern, there is little evidence of any practices of this sort. In contrast to earlier periods, the major medium for the experience of poetry in this period in England was the written or printed page, while the public performance of verse became the province of the theatre. Shakespeare’s fame as a poet has long been eclipsed, at least in the popular imagination, by his fame as a dramatist,
but for the Elizabethan literary elite, it was the printed books they could buy or borrow to read at home—Venus and Adonis and Lucrece—that marked him as a great writer.5 (The publication of his Sonnets in 1609, whether or not authorized by the poet himself, brought a different kind of fame.) The fact that Shakespeare, who can stand for the remarkable achievement of English Renaissance poetry, died in 1616 gives my terminal date a second appropriateness.6
POETRY, DRAMA, MUSIC
An even longer book than this could expand its subject matter to include theatre audiences’ experience of the poetry they heard during performances of verse drama. There is no doubt part of the pleasure generated by Euripides’ sophisticated handling of iambic trimeter or Marlowe’s sonorous employment of blank verse was of the same kind as that felt by audiences listening to Virgil read from the Aeneid or Chaucer recite one of the Canterbury Tales (if he ever did): that is to say, an enjoyment of the power of language itself as shaped by an inventive writer. One of the borders of our topic that we shall constantly be aware of is the line between poetic and dramatic genres. It’s a line that is not easy to draw, especially in eras during which plays make extensive use of verse. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible—and for the sake of this study’s length and focus, necessary—to distinguish between a form which relies on the fictional representation of characters interacting with one another in an imagined space and a form which invites a reader to enjoy a sequence of words for their own patterns and potency. One can envisage a culture in which the latter existed but not the former (Plato was drawn to this model), and vice versa.
The history of audiences’ and readers’ experience of drama raises a number of issues that are of no relevance to poetry outside dramatic literature, and the history of the experience of such poetry raises issues that are peculiar to non-dramatic verse. Borderline cases will occasionally occur, certainly, such as the practice of reading out a text presented on the page in dramatic form but never intended to be performed as an actual play—modern examples would include Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Anthony and Hardy’s The Dynasts—and there is a long tradition of pastoral poems with alternating speakers. The status of such texts as hard to categorize helps us to see the clear instances on either side. It will also be worth considering whether the existence of successful poetic drama in a particular culture enhanced or inhibited the writing and enjoyment of non-dramatic poetry.
The other type of performance which borders on poetry, and which is sometimes difficult to differentiate from it, is song. The origins of poetry lie in some form of musical performance, and the vocabulary of song continued to be employed throughout the period we are investigating in a way that is sometimes literal but very often purely metaphorical. The word ‘lyric’ reveals these origins, but with the spread of writing, the term shook off its association with music; once this had happened, the frequent self-referential uses of ‘sing’ in poems came to mean ‘I speak as a poet’. Here too, there are borderline cases, and these are more significant for this history than in the case of poetry’s relationship with drama. For example, modes of reciting poetry
The Experience
that utilize fixed tonal patterns, as may have been the case with the first performances of Homeric epic and with the chansons de geste in the twelfth century, to some degree sacrifice the potential of language’s own music in their obedience to an externally imposed configuration of sound. Given our uncertainty about the nature and degree of the musical contribution to the performance of such works—and the fact that they have survived without any musical notation—I have considered them as legitimate subjects for analysis. Poems that were more strictly composed as songs, such as archaic Greek lyrics, Christian hymns, and troubadour verse, I have paid less attention to, assuming that the musical dimension largely overrode the sounds of the language for their original hearers—although since they too have survived without their music and thus have become, for us, poems, they deserve a small place in this history.
The subject of this book, then, is a cultural practice that involves the performance of linguistic works that are neither dramatic representations nor songs (nor their combination in sung theatrical forms). Throughout this history, however, drama and song will be our constant companions.
PLEASURE
It would be possible to define poetry in strictly formal terms, so that it would include, for instance, recipes or spells in oral cultures given strongly mnemonic force by being regularly metrical and rhymed, even if these produced no pleasure for hearers other than that of being given the information they needed.7 By including the production of pleasure in my characterization of poetry I am limiting it to a somewhat smaller category, although I am in no way suggesting that such works cannot at the same time be conveyors of information; Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (to be discussed in Chapter 4) was indisputably written to convey ideas about life and the world, but if it provides enjoyment to the reader in its handling of language and rhythm, it is also indisputably a poem—and that it is a poem makes its inculcation of knowledge all the more effective and memorable. Of course, the uses to which texts are put vary from period to period and perhaps national culture to national culture; one can imagine a context in which Lucretius would be read in a wholly non-literary manner, though to undertake such a reading would be to overlook a dimension of the work that is part of its greatness.
Another way of raising the question of pleasure would be to invoke the idea of the aesthetic: my exclusion of purely informative linguistic sequences could be rephrased as a focus on texts with an ‘aesthetic’ purpose or effect. I hesitate to appeal to this term, however; the historical specificity of the discourse of the aesthetic, as a philosophical concept dating from the eighteenth century, together with the present connotations of the word (and even more, the connotations of ‘aestheticism’), would bring an unwanted complication into the discussion. Pleasure, on the other hand, however subject in its particular forms to historical change, is a topic discussed throughout the period being considered and can be assumed to be a constant element in the response to language given poetic form. I find it much easier to say that Callimachus’s
Hymns or Langland’s Piers Plowman were intended to provide pleasure, whatever else they were intended for, than to say that they had an aesthetic dimension.
It is not always easy to demonstrate the role of pleasure in the reception of poetic texts of the distant past, but it would be hard to deny that the use of techniques such as metre and rhyme gave pleasure to their audiences and readers. In oral cultures, these techniques were an important resource in enhancing memorability, and when knowledge had to be passed on from generation to generation without writing, memorability was a crucial factor in the transmission of cultural history and identity. But, as we shall see, even the earliest descriptions of the effect of poetry on its audience, the accounts of epic performance in the Odyssey, imply that far more is at stake than the conveying of information; to be a good performer is to be able to move and delight—and perhaps momentarily terrify or sadden—your hearers through your skill in handling metred language. This is not to claim that our current modes of experiencing poetry, and the enjoyment we derive from it, are identical to those prevalent in Ancient Greece and Rome or medieval and Renaissance Europe; just that all of these modes involve pleasure in the enhancement of language’s powers through the skilful handling of sound, rhythm, and the events of meaning, brought out in real-time performance.
EVIDENCE
When beginning this project, I confidently expected that in the periods for which I had relatively little prior knowledge I would be able to make use of secondary materials to summarize already settled arguments about the experience of poetry and the related question of its modes of performance. Instead, I found that in almost every period, the issue of performance was the subject of heated and ongoing debate, usually as part of a wider debate about literacy and orality. Are the Homeric poems as we have them the product of an oral or a literate culture? Was the cultural and political life of ancient Rome predominantly based on the spoken or the written word? Were medieval romances composed for public oral performance or private reading? Did the coming of print fundamentally alter the relation of reader and text? And so on— wherever I looked, there were questions, and few agreed answers.
A major reason for this, of course, is that the evidence is so scanty. The figures pertaining to drama give some indication of the scale of the losses of Ancient Greek literary works: where the Athenians were able to enjoy something like sixty plays by Aeschylus, seventy by Euripides, and over a hundred by Sophocles, we can read seven, eighteen or nineteen, and seven, respectively.8 A similar attenuation no doubt holds for other genres; for example, it is estimated that Sappho wrote some 10,000 lines of poetry, but only 650 of these survive.9 Only the smallest fragments of papyrus survive from Ancient Greece and Rome; the classical works that we read in modern editions are medieval copies of who knows how many earlier copies in a centuries-long chain of transcription. There are many stories of works that exist today thanks only to the near-miraculous survival of a single copy—perhaps the most famous of these is the
aforementioned De Rerum Natura10—and it’s impossible to tell what other treasures we have lost.
In the face of so much disagreement, I have had to reach my own conclusions after examining the evidence. This evidence has come from poems themselves, from paratexts and marginalia in manuscript and print, from grammars, treatises, and manuals, from references to poetry in letters, diaries, and other genres of text, from the appearance of poets on the stage, from the history of textual transmission, and from a number of other historical documents. As Roger Chartier, someone else with an abiding interest in this subject, has said, ‘The history of practices must be based on their manifold representations—in literature and iconography, in statements of norms, in autobiographical accounts, and so forth.’11 The traces of this history are sparse and scattered; we have much more information about how earlier ages regarded the content of poetry than we do about how it was performed and received. And we can never know what poetry actually sounded like in the mouths of performers of all the ages before the invention of recording technology; one only has to listen to the recordings of Tennyson or Browning to know how radically performance styles can change over quite a short period. We have a better sense of what poetry looked like once it became a matter of the visual surface as well as the voice; this becomes especially true in the later part of the Middle Ages (from which most of our copies of earlier, lost, writings come), and the invention of print gives the visual dimension a new and lasting importance.
There is much guesswork in these pages, then, by the commentators I cite and by me (though I hope my guesses are always informed and reasonable), but there is enough concrete evidence to limn at least an outline of the story of poetic experience in its varied manifestations over these twenty-four centuries.
PART I ANCIENT GREECE
1
Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers •
POETRY’S BEGINNINGS, AND BEFORE
Anyone seeking the origins of the modern Western cultural practice named in various European languages as ‘poetry’, ‘la poésie’, ‘la poesia’, ‘die Poesie’, or ‘poezia’ has to go back at least as far as those now dimly discernible centuries of vigorous cultural activity that we know as the Mycenaean civilization, a period when the territories encircling the Aegean Sea witnessed a high level of craftsmanship in the visual and plastic arts as well as, we may reasonably assume, in the sung or recited word.1 Scattered archaeological remains give us some sense of the achievements of this Bronze Age culture, at its height from about 1400 to about 1200 bc , and its cultural accomplishments are also fitfully reflected in what have come down to us through centuries-long traditions of oral transmission and textual copying as the two Homeric epics. Although they belong primarily to the Greek culture that eventually arose out of the ruins of the Mycenaean civilization, these two great works constitute the main body of evidence, skimpy as it is, for the Bronze Age beginnings of a linguistic tradition that around a thousand years later, in the fourth or third century bc , reached a form that is recognizable as the direct forebear of poetry—poetry as we find it today printed in books and magazines, recorded on tapes and discs, disseminated on the Internet, and performed in halls and classrooms. This chapter and Chapters 2 and 3 tell the story of that first millennium of poetry’s pre-history.
The Iliad and the Odyssey cannot be taken as reliable guides to the Aegean world in the Mycenaean era;2 nevertheless, the historical origins of the heroic events they relate—in particular, the fall of a great city in Asia Minor—are datable with a reasonable degree of certainty to that era, and more specifically to the thirteenth century bc . However slight the historical core of the Homeric epics, the existence of correspondences between what can be proved to have occurred and what is related in the works themselves means that a continuous oral tradition of some kind must have linked the two periods.3 The historical reality which they reflect is complicated, however, by the influence of both the Mycenaean period and the centuries that lay between it and the time at which the two epics achieved something like their final
The Experience of Poetry
form—usually thought to have been late in the eighth or early in the seventh century bc , the period which seems to be most fully mirrored in their contents (though some scholars argue for a date as late as the sixth century).4 The language of the epics is also an amalgam reflecting different periods and localities, suggestive of accretions as the epics were passed on from performer to performer, age to age.
Doubtless, this much-chronicled cultural beginning in the Mycenaean palaces was in fact a continuation of an even more ancient heritage, deriving perhaps from older Phoenician and Egyptian traditions,5 but we can do no more than make guesses about the centuries, if not millennia, of verbal performances that lie behind the written texts we are able to read today, and which, faute de mieux, we have to take as the starting-point of our investigations. Thus, in focusing in this chapter on the evidence for modes of performance provided by the Homeric epics (the reason for avoiding the term ‘poems’ will be made clear shortly), we shall be attempting to reconstruct a cultural practice that by the eighth century may have existed relatively unchanged for hundreds of years, and may have been as characteristic of Mycenaean palace culture as of the Aegean courts five centuries later. On the other hand, this practice may have ceased entirely by the eighth century bc —though the epics suggest that if this were the case, it remained a vivid presence in shared memories.
In setting out to examine these ancient origins of our modern poetic practices, one likely place to begin might seem to be the words ‘poem’, ‘poet’, and ‘poetry’ themselves, and their cognates in the other modern European languages. Many English treatises on poetry have set out in this way, often finding a happy match with what was once an alternative term for the writer of verse: ‘maker’—a word that nicely translates the Greek poiētēs. Thus, George Puttenham begins The Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, as follows: ‘A Poet is as much to say as a maker. And our English name well conformes with the Greeke word: for of ποιεῖν [poiein] to make, they call a maker Poeta.’6 Sir Philip Sidney says of the poet, ‘I know not, whether by lucke or wisedome, wee Englishmen have mette with the Greekes in calling him a maker.’7 Although the term ‘maker’ has not been used since the eighteenth century to mean ‘poet’ except as a deliberate archaism, it was not uncommon in this earlier period (and was a familiar usage in Scots). This etymological derivation satisfied the need felt by Renaissance theorists like Puttenham and Sidney to present poets as skilled artisans, crafting the language into the forms of elaborate artifice8—though to balance this emphasis on the willed exercise of expertise with an acknowledgment of the unpredictable and uncontrollable element in poetic composition, Renaissance commentators often added that the Romans called the poet vates, ‘seer’.
Etymology will not, however, take us as far back as we want to go. In the Homeric epics, probably the earliest body of Greek verse to have survived, there is not a single occurrence of the word poiētēs, nor of poiēma, ‘poem’; and when the verb poieō is used, as it often is, it means ‘make’ or ‘do’ without any reference to the craft of poetry. Poiētēs and poiēma are not, in fact, clearly attested until the fifth century bc (along with melopoios, ‘maker of songs’), by which time Greek cultural habits, and the nature
Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers
of verbal performance, had, as we shall see, changed enormously from the practices we find represented in the early epics.9 And when these words finally do appear, they have a very wide application, retaining some of the general force of ‘maker’ and ‘thing made’: they take in drama as well as what we would now call song and recited verse, so that the forerunner of modern poetry, in its emergence as a separate art-form, lacks a distinct label. (Aristotle, for instance, complains that there is no word for the mimetic art that uses verse.)10 The word mousikē, from which our ‘music’ is derived, is also a later arrival in Greek, developing out of the idea that artistic capacity has its source in the Muses and including in its range of reference other arts besides music.
The reason why etymological tracings cannot help us in this period is not simply a matter of historical contingency: it has a substantial cause. As far as we can tell, there was no practice in Ancient Greek culture—at least before papyrus rolls began to circulate widely in the fourth century bc and perhaps not even then—corresponding exactly to the activity that the term ‘poetry’ now conjures up. Even the term ‘music’ is misleading when we apply it to the centuries before about 500 bc . What this means is that our discussion of the origins of Western poetry has to grapple not just with the difficulty of reconstructing a distant and—to us—strange way of doing things but also with the inappropriate connotations of a long-entrenched terminology that we find it very hard to do without. Commentators still employ the misleading terms ‘poetry’ and ‘poet’ to refer to the Homeric period, and we need not be surprised that this is so, given the inadequacy of the vocabulary at our disposal. Terms like ‘literature’, ‘art’ (in the sense of ‘art-work’), and ‘aesthetic’, too, suggest modern concepts, or conceptual clusters, that are inappropriate to this period and have to be handled with great care.
The least misleading way to label the cultural activity which preceded the development of forms more akin to modern poetry and music is as ‘song’, and this is the term I shall employ here. It’s a well-known fact that the citizens of archaic and classical11 Greek communities produced and experienced both verbal and musical art primarily as song, often with dance as an integral component as well, and for two more centuries at least it is probable that most verse was associated with song or a song-like mode of performance.12 In the Homeric works the usual term for the performer of epics is aoidos, for which the simplest translation is ‘singer’ (though this figure is much more than that); terms like ‘minstrel’ or ‘bard’, despite their appropriateness to some aspects of the profession being represented, have the unfortunate effect of conjuring up all the trappings of a medieval court.
However, our modern conception of song, though certainly closer to archaic Greek practices than our modern conceptions of poetry and of music, can also lead us astray. We tend to think of song as words—usually in verse of some kind—set to music. Such an attitude depends on our taking for granted the separateness of verse and music, on the assumption that they each have their own independent existence on the basis of which they are able to participate in the happy marriage that is song. It’s difficult to avoid carrying this assumption back with us to Homeric Greece. But all the evidence we have suggests that to these early Greeks, there was no such thing as non-musical poetry and perhaps, even, no such thing as non-verbal music, at least within the higher social strata. (Rustic instrumental performances might well have
