JSTOR Daily has a post on the British soldier-poet Edward Thomas, killed in action in 1917; it consists mainly of scans of his poetry in MS form, which is interesting in its own right, but I was stopped by this passing observation: “In the army, Thomas wanted to hide from other soldiers the fact that he was writing poetry, so he wrote straight across the page, using commas to signal line breaks.” It reminded me of Dmitry Bykov’s point that when Valentin Kataev quoted poetry in his novelized memoirs, he did so without line breaks in order to partially efface the boundary between poetry and prose. (Thanks, Bathrobe!)
Thomas wanted to hide from other soldiers the fact that he was writing poetry
The film Hedd Wyn, that I mentioned the other day, has an episode where the eponymous poet, serving at the Western Front, is told that he cannot send his poem Yr Arwr (for which he was posthumously awarded the bardic chair at the 1917 National Eisteddfod) by the army postal service because his superior cannot read Welsh and suspects it may be a coded message. However, this all seems (disappointingly) to be an invention of Alan Llwyd’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedd_Wyn_(film)
Hedd Wyn is, of course, Welsh for ‘headwind.’
True. Yet another English loanword from Welsh. John McWhorter knows about these things …
(It’s just occurred to me that heddwas “policeman” is clearly the source of the American “peace officer.” An obvious calque.)
It’s also the source for “hetman” and “ataman”.
Isn’t there also a story that ee cummings was not allowed to send his poetry by mail during WWI because it was suspected to be in code?
he did so without line breaks in order to partially efface the boundary between poetry and prose
I’ve mentioned recently on LH that Leonid Kaganov’s “odes” series of supposedly-poems had rhyme and meter as if poetry but were otherwise formatted as prose. (They weren’t very good poetry, to be honest, and not that much better prose, but I thought the formatting choice was interesting.)
A mostly-complete listing is here; he also did a series of more traditionally shaped poetry (and some of his other “poetry” works do not belong in either series).
Quite coincidentally, the Guardian today has a piece about the British Great War poet Ivor Gurney, whose writings from an asylum were ignored…. “But a new study reveals their genius”
‘Silenced’ voice of Great War poet to be heard for first time
Academics are currently hard at work to enable Oxford University Press to publish all the asylum poetry Gurney wrote in a way that allows it to be understood. “What he’s writing is fascinating, if you give it time. It’s not a matter of saying it’s all totally sane, because it may well not be, but it is extremely interesting,” says Kennedy. “And it tells you something of the way the mind works, when it is totally isolated and free to range in whatever way it wants.”
Reminds me of Christopher Smart:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilate_Agno
Old English poetry was written like prose.
I wonder when the practice of writing poetry on separate lines came into use?
It’s certainly the norm in Greek verse papyri.
Come to think of it, it’s as old as the Greek alphabet: the Nestor’s Cup inscription has line divisions, though the Dipylon oenochoe doesn’t.
“In the army, Thomas wanted to hide from other soldiers the fact that he was writing poetry, so he wrote straight across the page, using commas to signal line breaks.”
That, or maybe paper was just hard to get a hold of. There are archives of soldiers’ letters during the Civil War written across the page and then written on the same page turned 90 degrees in order to get the most text possible onto the page..
“There are archives of soldiers’ letters during the Civil War written across the page and then written on the same page turned 90 degrees in order to get the most text possible onto the page.” I assume this means the American Civil War! ‘Crossing’ letters was a fairly well-known practice in Britain before the advent of the Uniform Penny Post in 1840, because it was cheaper to send a single sheet of paper.