Poetry
The form that refuses to die
Description
Poetry is the oldest of the literary arts and the one with the smallest contemporary audience. It predates writing Homer is older than the alphabet that recorded him and it has remained a working form into a century where most of its conditions have changed. Verse has lost the cultural centrality it had as recently as 1920. The audience for serious poetry today is a fraction of what it was for the Victorians, who treated Tennyson as a public figure on the level of any minister. The form persists anyway.
Most contemporary poetry is read by other poets, by teachers and students, and by a small unpredictable group of readers who find their way in. The total number is small. The number of working poets who can support themselves on poetry alone is essentially zero. The number who hold academic positions and publish books with print runs in the low thousands is substantial. The economics of the form are unusual and almost everyone involved knows it.
Poetry is also, against this, one of the more durable parts of literary culture. The audience is small but loyal. The work being produced is at a high technical level. The historical canon Homer, Sappho, Dante, Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Whitman, Eliot, Bishop is more accessible than at any earlier moment. The popular face of the form, in slam and Instapoetry, has its own audience that overlaps only partially with the literary one. Both belong to what poetry is now.
The question we're asking: what poetry has been, and what it does now that the audience is small.
What we'll see: the oral epic, the printed lyric, the modernist break, and the present scene.
Table of contents
01Homer and the oral form
The Iliad and the Odyssey, composed sometime around 750 to 700 BC and refined over generations of oral performance before being written down, are the foundation texts of European literature. They were not, in their original form, written. They were sung or recited by trained performers who had learned the metrical and formulaic techniques that allowed an extended narrative to be carried in memory. Milman Parry's work in the 1930s, comparing the Homeric texts with the still-living oral traditions of the Balkans, established that this was how Homer had been composed.
The implications for what counts as poetry are larger than they look. Most of the world's literary traditions began as oral verse. The Sanskrit epics, the Old English Beowulf, the medieval Irish and Welsh material all had a substantial oral life before being written down, and the techniques the poets used were designed for performance and memory. Rhythm, repetition, formulaic phrasing, the standard epithets that fill out a metrical line these are not decorative features. They are the structural conditions of an oral form, and the early written poetry inherits them directly.
02The lyric and the page
Print did several things to poetry. It allowed the poem to be a fixed object, separable from the moment of its delivery, and it allowed readers to encounter poems in their own time and at their own pace. The sonnet, which arrived in English from Italy in the sixteenth century and was settled into its English form by Shakespeare and a few contemporaries, is one of the forms that became fully itself only in print. Fourteen lines of intricately rhymed argument, often turning at the ninth line and resolving in the final couplet, could be performed but were really designed to be reread. The reader could see the structure on the page.
The lyric tradition that ran from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century built on these conditions. Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne's metaphysical poems, Herbert's religious verse, the long Augustan tradition of Pope and Dryden, the lyric tradition of the Romantics all of these were poems that lived primarily on the page, with the page's conditions shaping what they could do. The reader could pause, reread, follow the argument across multiple stanzas, hold the structure in mind. The poem became something denser than the oral form had usually been, with more compressed thought and more elaborate formal architecture.
03The modernist break
The modernist break in poetry happened in the same period as the breaks in the other arts and for related reasons. The conventional poetic forms the iambic pentameter line, the rhymed stanza, the sonnet, the ode — felt to a generation of poets as if they could no longer carry the kinds of statement the period needed to make. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, the various French and German and Spanish poets working in the same direction — all of them were looking for a poetic language that could register the texture of the new century without falling back on the inherited cadences.
The Waste Land, published by Eliot in 1922, is the canonical case. The poem is fragmentary, multi-vocal, full of quotation in several languages, and structured in a way that does not announce itself on first reading. The reader is expected to do work that earlier lyric poetry had done for them — to make the connections, to follow the references, to assemble the meaning out of pieces. The poem is also, in its way, a great work, with passages that have remained as powerful as anything in twentieth-century poetry. But it asked something of its reader that earlier poetry had not asked, and it permanently changed what serious poetry was expected to do.
04The present scene
Contemporary poetry is more varied than any earlier moment in the form's history, and it is read by a smaller percentage of the population than it has been since Homer. Both of these things are true at the same time. The institutional infrastructure that supports poetry the university creative writing programmes, the small presses, the journals, the foundations that fund residencies and prizes is substantial and produces work at a high technical level. The audience for that work is mostly inside the institution. Outside it, poetry happens in different ways.
Slam poetry, which started in Chicago in the 1980s and spread internationally over the next decade, is a return to the oral conditions the form began under. The poem is performed, in front of an audience, often as part of a competition, with judging based on audience response. The slam tradition has produced major figures Saul Williams, Patricia Smith, Kae Tempest, others and an audience that has only partial overlap with the audience for written poetry. Some of the work is also strong on the page. Some of it is meant to live only in performance and is judged on those terms.
05Conclusion
Poetry has been the form that refuses to die for almost three thousand years. It survived the loss of its oral conditions when writing arrived. It survived the loss of its primary religious and courtly contexts when those institutions changed. It survived the rise of the novel, the rise of cinema, the rise of recorded music and television. The audience has been smaller in some periods than in others, the form has changed substantially with each shift, and the cultural position has gone up and down. The form itself has continued.