From an Introduction to English Poetry: A Special AP2 Supplement

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2002 by Fenton, James

A Special APs Supplement

1. The History and Scope of English Poetry English poetry begins whenever we decide to say that the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say the English language extends. We cannot expect everyone to agree with us when we make a decision in either case. Some people, for instance, think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learnt like any foreign language. Anglo-Saxon poetry may be extremely exciting and interesting, but it excites and interests me (when it does) in much the same way that Norse sagas excite. It is somebody else's poetry.

A part of the meaning of this can be guessed. But who, without specialist help, could arrive at the conclusion that someone is here putting on his armour, and who could guess the meaning of `queme quyssewes' (pleasing thigh-pieces) or 'wlonk' (noble, glorious, fine)? Who could guess their pronunciation?

Most of this can be guessed, although there is a word-order problem in lines 3-4: `For in the sea the boat of my ability ("Of my conning") has such difficulty that I can scarcely steer it.' Even when this has been pointed out to us, we find it hard to know whether the strange word order came naturally to Chaucer or was a sign of his incompetence. We need to acquire certain skills in order to read and appreciate such verse.

Some time around the reign of Henry VIII (1509-47), English poetry-some of it-becomes graspable in a newly direct way. We no longer need to look everything up, or worry overmuch about pronunciation (and therefore scansion). It is not that we can dispense with the notes, or with the help of our teachers the scholars, altogether. It is just that with sixteenth-century poetry we recognize much more of the language we still speak, and this is encouraging.

These verses are from a song by Thomas Campion (1567-1620). The music survives, so we can tell exactly what rhythm was intended, that 'scorched' was pronounce with two syllables, 'beanes' with one, and so forth. But we could easily have guessed such things even without music.

This was written in 1935, for a documentary film about the coal industry. Like the Campion, it is a song. Both Benjamin Britten and Lennox Berkeley have set it to music, the former giving it to a female chorus. The charm of "Madrigal," as the poem was once called, comes from the contrast between its centuries-old idiom and its grimy contemporary (I930s) setting. 'Black' is used in Campion's manner, but without his meaning.

Let us say that we have about five centuries of English poetry behind us. The poetry did not emerge out of nowhere, but that fact is that beyond those five centuries ago it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend, whereas within those centuries people use strikingly similar vocabulary, grammar, poetic forms, and meters. It is true that to understand Shakespeare (1564-1616) in detail, we need the help of notes, and it has been true at certain times in the past that readers have found large parts of Shakespeare incomprehensible or barbaric. The current assumption that all the plays are in principle both performable and worth performing is comparatively new.

But the really striking thing about, say, the recent film of Romeo and Juliet is the effectiveness with which the poetry communicates, and does so when delivered at great speed. Leonardo diCaprio did not slow down in order to get a complex point across. He simply made sure that he understood the point and assumed that his understanding would be enough to carry the audience with him. That is what any actor has to do. When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation. And I like an edition, such as the Arden editions, which gives detailed notes on the same page. But any poetry that is performed-- from song lyric to tragic speech-must make its point, as it were, without reference back. We can't, as an audience, ask the actors to repeat themselves, or slow down, or share their notes with us. We must grasp the meaning-or enough of it-in real time. That Hamlet still works after 400 years is an extraordinary linguistic and poetic fact.

English poetry extends back around 500 years, and its scope is the scope of the English language. That is to say, when a North American, an Australian, an Indian, or a Jamaican writes a poem in English, that poem enters the corpus of English poetry. Of course it may be that the poet in question was intending to contribute to a national school of poetry, was intending to add his or her brick to the edifice of a national effort. But the community of any English poem today is larger than any nation-state. And besides, the geography of poetry is not the same as the geography of nation-states. Welsh poetry is written for Welsh-speakers wherever they may be. It is not written for all citizens of the United Kingdom. One could easily imagine a Spanish poetry being written in the United States whose community, through language, would be Hispanics everywhere. An Amharic, writing in Toronto about life on the streets of Toronto, would be writing for Ethiopians-or at least Amharic-- speakers-everywhere. And a poet writing in Chinese has the notable advantage of being able to communicate with anyone who understands written Chinese: the community is in the script.