on 8/8/01 5:35 PM, Matthew Francis at [log in to unmask]
wrote:
> I knew Francis quite well when we both lived in Winchester. He gave
> occasional poetry readings in a high dramatic style which was quite
> effective once you got over the initial culture shock. (He was famous as a
> poetry reader in his younger days and wrote a book about voice in poetry.)
> When I knew him, he was already into his 80s, and had a charming,
> considerably younger wife, Eileen, who confined him to one corner of one
> room, which he would cover with papers and cigarette ash. He gave me a copy
> of his Collected Poems, which I'm embarrassed to say I haven't read much
> of - being rather daunted by the size of the book, the length of the poems
> and the lack of an obvious entry point. I've just got it down, following
> Robin's recommendation, and am having another look.
How about posting a couple from the Collected to supplement the two in
_Brit Po Since 1945_ ("Hvalsey" and "Vadstena"), Matthew? Berry is new to me
also and quite interesting, meadevil-wise.
Just to clarify a number of languages, poetics, and poems that seem to have
been conflated relative to alliteration, we need to keep in mind that
Beowulf is a textual artifact of an oral-poetics tradition in which the
alliteration served to bind pairs of hemistiches, which weren't even _half_
lines prior to the introduction of writing but merely 2-measure units.
(There's a story about either Albert Lord or one of his predecessors in the
Yugoslavian oral-poetics field taping the performance of one such unlettered
poet and then rushing excitedly up to the fellow exclaiming, "You compose in
perfect measures!" To which the oral poet naturally replied, "What's a
measure?")
Both Langland and the Gawain/Pearl poet were _writers_ who used the old
oral-alliterative device (as did the author of the alliterative Morte
D'Artur, btw) to make a sociopolitical/aesthetic point about the existence
of poetry elsewhere in England besides the Court--Langland making his point
in plain style (comparatively), while the Gawain/Pearl poet heightened the
artifice so artfully in order (I suspect) both to tweak the Court poets and
to show that he could!
The other thing to keep in mind relative to Modern English translations of
Old English versus Middle English alliterative poems is how different the
actual languages are: Middle English is so close to Modern that I've never
seen the point of translating it at all, whereas Old English is so much more
like German as to be a foreign language to us speakers of Modern. The
alliteration that Michael finds so heavy-handed or hard on the ear in Modern
English would have had quite a different effect on the unlettered Old
English audience listening to the scop bang out Beowulf at 60 lines/minute
or some such phenomenal speed.
Candice
P.S. Why isn't Christopher Walker or some other listee who knows all this
taking up these threads? (Don't I have enough to do around here?!)
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