Daniel A. Rabuzzi sent me a link to his Strange Horizons review of Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival (edited by Dennis Wilson Wise); he has interesting things to say:
Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology deepens and nuances my understanding of what speculative poetry is and how it relates both to speculative fiction and to wider poetic traditions in English. In the course of this book, Dennis Wilson Wise demonstrates convincingly how the structural alliteration that was central to Old English poetry (and that of other old Germanic languages) remains vital today, drawing a line from Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Poul Anderson to Patrick Rothfuss, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, and Jo Walton. Wise carefully lays out his definition of “speculative poetry,” taking an ecumenical view that includes “SF, horror, and the weird as well as fantasy, plus “other kinds of imaginative writing with a generic kinship to fantastika” (p. 14). […]
First, the nuts and bolts: Wise has curated 166 poems by fifty-five poets, with author biographies, detailed end notes, and a bibliography, bracketed by a forty-six-page introduction (combining a thorough-going literary history with a thoughtful statement of aesthetic principles) and an eighteen-page “Metrical Essay on Three Alliterative Traditions.” He is a careful and generous scholar, making clear and considered arguments in an undogmatic way. He engages with the most influential scholars of Old English meter (including Thorlac Turville-Petre, Roberta Frank, Eric Weiskott, and, of course, Tolkien), with leading researchers into modern reception of OE texts such as Heather O’Donoghue, Tom Shippey, and Chris Jones, and with Ted Hughes, Rahul Gupta, Paul Douglas Deane, and other practitioners who have weighed in on OE matters metrical.
Wise is an able guide to the demanding intricacies of OE alliterative structure, which is alien territory for speakers of modern English. To start, he distinguishes between “ornamental” and “structural” alliteration: “However many pickled peppers Peter Piper may have picked, Mr. Piper’s exploits only teach us about the ornamental kind of alliteration, not the structural kind” (p. 377). The structure in question is based on “primary alliteration across an ax/ax or aa/ax pattern; two lifts [the heavily stressed long syllables] and two dips in each verse, and a medial caesura” (p. 380). Of course, as Wise informs us, several patterns were possible and discrepancies abound that highlight, in their contravention of them, the rules. More to his immediate point, “contemporary revivalists range across a wide spectrum of metrical fidelity [including] purists … who accurately imitate more known features of the alliterative meter than not [and] impressionists [who are] less engaged with replicating a historical alliterative tradition and instead prefer medieval ‘flavoring’ to one degree or another” (p. 12). Wise’s sliding scale of purist-to-impressionist is useful, and facilitates a broad church.
I hadn’t been familiar with either the revival of alliteration or the useful term fantastika (defined here), and I’m all for a broad church. Furthermore, Rabuzzi gave me pleasure by quoting a poet I like and don’t think many people know about:
Wise’s expansive view of what poetry can be, and how it can be judged, deserves a wide audience, both among those who read speculative literature and those who don’t. His approach should not be controversial, as it accords with that of the many recent anthologists who have opted to reject Procrustean regimes. For instance, here is Elaine Equi explaining her selection rubric for The Best American Poetry 2023 (co-edited for Scribner with David Lehman): “I understood best to mean the most engaging, most original, most stimulating work I came across. I didn’t overthink it. For my purposes, ‘best’ would be a mutable word, not a canonical one.”
I’ve got a copy of Equi’s first book, Federal Woman (1978), with its epigraph “disregard books, literature, documents – demand large words, entire cities for yourself”; her poem “Dolor” starts:
Dolor — sadness kept as a powder in small jars
sometimes distinguished by a Greek label
and scented with vanilla.
As in the sentence:
“He drave her away and took out his jar of dolor.”
You can read more recent poems by her here. Thanks, Daniel!
Looks very interesting.
I have to say I’m astonished to read a capacious review of a book on modern alliterative poetry and see no mention of Pound or Auden.
I think the closest German has to this is parodies of Wagner…
Alliteration has never gone away in Welsh poetry …
Auden’s wonderful long poem The Age of Anxiety is in alliterative verse throughout.
Elaine Equi is a wonder! And I do love her volume of BAP, for reasons selfish and otherwise.
what a fantastic review! and the book sounds amazing as well!
i do feel compelled to snarl at rabuzzi about one thing, though, which is about words and their uses so feels appropriate to bring in here. he writes: “The poets included in Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival are positive, inclusive, apolitical; their work is an antidote and corrective to the abuse and misuse of the traditions.”
this is transparently nonsense. writing poetry in a cultural tradition that has been adopted by white supremacists and fascists, and refusing to be part of that far right use of it, is a political act. so is refusing to anthologize works by poets connected to Asatru Folk Assembly, and to instead circulate writing by members of The Troth. and so is pointing out those choices in a review. things are still political if you agree with them. and moveover, encouraging the idea that any political position you agree with is “apolitical” is a powerful gift to the fascist far right, which has made that fiction central to its presentation of itself as a “third way” or “beyond right and left” for over a century.
and by the same token, writing white supremacist and fascist alliterative poetry is not an “abuse” or “misuse” of the tradition – that would be following in the footsteps of iolo [YOLO!] morganwg or james macpherson. far right alliterative poems are a use of the tradition that i, like rabuzzi and wise, think is appalling and would like not to happen. that’s our shared – and political – position, though, and has to do with what’s in the poems, not their status in the alliterative poetic tradition. if fred chappell’s picnic is a valid part of that tradition, so are the scrawlings of some chud from Asatru Folk Assembly, if their work is inside the formal zone that defines it. and dealing with the presence of that kind of writer takes concrete political thinking, and political actions like the ones wise made as an anthologist, not No True Scop dodges, which do nothing to deplatform them and hand them an opportunity to No True Skald right back.
rabuzzi seems to understand at least parts of this, writing “Traditions are, of course, mercurial, with many claimants” – so it’s disappointing to see how quickly (1 intervening sentence) the review moves determinedly away from that understanding.
DE:
Alliteration, assonance … that whole resplendent armoury of soundplay never went away, but held resounding rhetorical sway come what may by way of modish swell of rhyme and tide of metre. A timely reminder. Sonnet or song, I’d never render verse without regard for sound of syllable.
Yes, I had noticed that …
I was not specific enough in my statement.
In Welsh poetry, structural alliteration has never gone away. Not every modern poet uses it (any more than every modern poet uses rhyme in English), but the tradition is alive and well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynghanedd
@Noetica:
True are your words, but a trifle off
this piece’s point. Its alliteration’s
not merely music: it follows rules
of stress and structure, in style resembling
Nordic of old, whether near or far.
Edit: I see that Eddyshaw
says a somewhat similar thing.
Indeed: yet in leaden prose, alas.
(Words to the wise: they’re hardly ever wasted.)
Such constraints of structure, soft or strict,
were once expressed in olden ways
but faded first to options then to fads.
Next rhyme held rule, that continental crime.
A Norman norm, and levered out at last –
when lean unlovely blankness bore the bier.
Still, structured or no, see now how salient appear alliteration and assonance in Shakespeare (some seen as internal rhyme betimes, or be it rigid repetition):
(Rough and ready markup; more could be made.)
Funnily, I tend to agree with rozele, minus the stridency. Harking back to the ancient traditions of a people, race, or language does tend to be the territory of, if not fascists or supremacists, then at least people who might tend towards racialised views of history. The era of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse was confined to a particular historical period and place, before centuries of continental and then broader cultural influences effectively consigned it to the fringes. Why should an American, or Australian, or any other person with some kind of English-speaking heritage, look back at that geographically narrow, Germanic period of the history of English and hold it up as something we should somehow get back to?
I am prepared to be pilloried for this. I have moved from a romantically essentialised view of linguistic history to a certain scepticism, whether it is of the worship of the culture and script of the ancient states of China (which is concomitant with Han chauvinism), the romanticisation of pre-classical Japanese, or any other kind of past-worship by modern peoples.
Alliterative verse in premodern English was not in fact confined to the “Anglo-Saxon” period.
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and “Piers Plowman” are famous examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_Revival
There is dispute about this, but it seems to have actually been more of a reinvention rather than a revival.
Auden was no fascist.
As in Auden’s case, there can be artistic reasons for reviving older literary forms, which need have nothing to do with ethnonationalism.
There is a broader question here as well. It is not inevitable that nationalism has to be either racist or reactionary. By chance, I was just reading this:
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/escaping-england
(I’m not altogether persuaded by this, but it makes some interesting points.)
The modern history of both Plaid Cymru and the SNP shows that nationalists can be progressives, even if we proud internationalists think that this is irrational of them and would prefer the world to be simpler.
@Bathrobe:
Why should an American, or Australian, or any other person with some kind of English-speaking heritage, look back at that geographically narrow, Germanic period of the history of English and hold it up as something we should somehow get back to?
Why do you think that’s what the review and the book are about? The writers mentioned whose verse I’ve read have all written in other forms as well. They didn’t say we should get back to it. They decided to get back to it in certain poems for, as David Eddyshaw said, artistic reasons. Turning to a less successful poet, I’ve imitated Hebrew, French, Welsh, Provencal, Greek, Latin, Japanese, and Chinese forms as well as forms from the history of English up to modern times (though not this annoying idea of using slashes instead of line breaks). I didn’t do that because “we” should; I did it for the challenge and fun and in some cases because I thought the forms were appropriate for some reason. Shameless self-promotion: you can click on my name above, though you won’t find all the ethnicities I mentioned.
Quite possibly some poems in Wise’s anthology are by people who think some “we” (speakers of Germanic languages, people with a lot of Germanic-speaking ancestors, revivers of ancient Germanic religions [*]) should somehow get back to that period in literature. But I’ll bet they’re a small minority.
I hope I’m not pillorying you.
[*] In front of fields where free birds fly, he kind of revived polytheism (9).
@Noetica: Shakespeare never hurts, but I don’t see your point. If it’s that lots of verse has alliteration and other sound repetitions though it’s not in the medieval Germanic tradition with structural alliteration, nevertheless “alliterative verse” does conventionally refer to that tradition. If it’s that you don’t think old traditions should be revived or even maintained (like rhyme), you’re entitled to your tastes and so are others.
I’m quite sure Noetica knows all that, and I can assure you he loves old traditions in verse — he’s very good at them himself. He’s just making a point about the “whole resplendent armoury of soundplay.”
Rhyme became more common in English poetry post -1066, but the “mainstream” Continental tradition of rhymed poetry that spread across the Channel does not come from posh pagan Latin models but from rustic and vulgar medieval Church Latin. What’s the standard account of how rhyme first entered and then dominated the newer style of Latin (and then Romance etc.) verse? Can credit be given to the influence of the Ostrogoths or Lombards or some similarly Nordic/Aryan interlopers that unsavory revivalists could get excited about?
Reading The Lord of the Rings to my son lately, it’s gotten to the point where, when we get to a Rohan poem, he points out the alliteration before I do.
I tend to perhaps too hastily assume rhyme in medieval Latin reflects Arabic influence, like other aspects of the troubadour tradition, but I have no idea what the literary scholars think about that these days. After all, we can be fairly certain that rhyme has emerged independently in multiple places (it’s a prominent feature of Old Chinese poetry); why not in Europe as well?
I tend to perhaps too hastily assume rhyme in medieval Latin reflects Arabic influence, like other aspects of the troubadour tradition, but I have no idea what the literary scholars think about that these days.
Same here, and I too would be curious to know what today’s scholars think.
Welsh poetry rhymed from its very beginnings (before it was even, strictly speaking, “Welsh”) in Aneirin and Taliesin. Unfortunately, the question of just how far back Y Gododdin and Taliesin’s praise-poems to Urien really go is extremely fraught, but even on the least romantic showing the oldest bits seem likely to far antedate any plausible Arabic influence. Well before any troubadours …
Gwŷr a aeth Gatraeth gan wawr,
Dygymyrrws eu hoed eu hanianawr …
(Note the structural* alliteration, too. This was, of course, still a time when Welsh poetry was practically free verse. Yer proper cynghanedd hadn’t been invented yet. Why have only two constraints on formal verse form when you could have three?)
* OK?
Rhymed poetry had its origin in the Christian poetry of late antiquity:
The key in the German ulr block-quoted may be the adjective “allmählich” (= “gradually” or ” bit by bit” or something). My own unchecked recollection of when rhyme because common in Latin hymnody was off – the non-classical style of medieval Churchy Latin verse is already underway before A.D. 400 but those early examples were unrhymed and by the time rhyming was in full flower there’s no longer a timeline problem with Arabic influence. Although there are some people that say some of the earlier examples were in exactly the wrong part of Europe (Irish monks wandering around 8th-century Germany, that sort of thing) for Arabic contact to be an obvious vector. And some seem to think that the general shift from quantitative meter to rhythmic stress-based meter made rhyme such an obvious fit that it was maybe just a matter of dumb luck when and via what random catalyst that new potentiality would be actualized.
And some seem to think that the general shift from quantitative meter to rhythmic stress-based meter made rhyme such an obvious fit that it was maybe just a matter of dumb luck when and via what random catalyst that new potentiality would be actualized.
Yeah, I can buy that.
Mediaeval Irish rhyme works rather differently from that found in other traditions, IIRC (including Welsh.) And very differently from Classical Arabic.
I’m for the polycentric origin idea (the case of Chinese, that Lameen cites, is pretty clear evidence that we don’t need to assume monogenesis.)
Classical Arabic metre is quantitative, by the way, not stress-based. So rhyme is not dependent on stress in general.
Yes, and it’s important to keep emphasizing that, because our monkey brains keep looking for One Simple Explanation.
In that new-fangled Welsh cywydd poetry, a stressed syllable must always rhyme with an unstressed syllable:
O’th gerais å maith gariad
Caru am garu a gad …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cywydd
I don’t know if this is connected in some way with the shift of Welsh stress from final to penultimate syllables (itself difficult to date, but which presumably happened during the Middle Welsh period.)