The sixth in the series of guest-posts from Dennis Wilson Wise, of which the most recent is here, lays out some of the critical underpinnings of the overall project. As before, editorial intrusion is minimal.
Check back for the next post in the series soon!
Too, please let us know if you've got ideas for guest-posts or series of your own; we'd love to hear from you!
đne oddity about the Modern Revival is that, historically, critics donât normally categorize literary movements according to poetic form alone. For instance, we donât talk about the âRhyming Octosyllabic Revolutionâ of Anglo-Norman England, or the âBlank Verse-ismâ of the Elizabethan stage. This oddity has been one reason (out of several) some medievalists have challenged the notion of an âalliterative revivalâ in the mid-14th century at all. After all, no medieval source ever mentions such a movement. The whole idea is a hypothesis put forth by modern scholars. Although my Brit Lit I survey course in college confidently taught the mid-14th century revival as accepted fact, quite a few recent scholars have argued that just because various late medieval poems share a certain set of metrical similarities, they neednât constitute an actual community of poets with similar attitudes or aims. The whole notion of metrical revivalism in the later Middle Ages is, therefore, a shot in the dark that misses â badly. Or so the argument goes.
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It's a hot time... Image provided by Wise |
Luckily, with everyoneâs favorite modern revival, we stand on surer ground. Even if William Langland, say, didnât necessarily rub elbows with the Gawain-poet, many contemporary revivalists believe he didâŠand most have no trouble imagining their own revivalism in parallel terms with the alleged 14th-century movement.
That raises an interesting question, though. Despite the alliterative meter fading out of common usage by the 16th century, alliteration itself has remained a tried-and-true device for English-language poets. What, then, separates a genuine revivalist poet from one who merely adds a little ornamental alliteration to their lines â i.e., an extra flourish of ârum ram rufâ for special effect?
Just my last two blog entries alone show how tricky this question can be. In âDear Tolkien Estate,â Schaubertâs metrics would have made any Old English poet proud. No medieval poet, however, would recognize Majmudarâs âThe Grail Questâ as a valid alliterative text. Yet it clearly is a 21st-century revivalist poem. The problem isnât only that the alliterative meter requires more than just alliteration (although some medievalists such Eric Weiskott, in fact, have argued against alliteration serving any real metrical function in the co-called âalliterativeâ meter). The problem is that individual revivalists can vary widely â and inconveniently, at least for critics who want to study this stuff â on exactly which features of the medieval alliterative meter they wish to revive.
One way to tackle this conundrum is by imagining an informal metrical scale that ranges 1 through 10, from arch-purists to extreme impressionists. Generally speaking, the latter group has little interest in faithfully reproducing the historical meter. For the purists, though, such fidelity does matter because they necessarily consider metrical fidelity a part of their overall literary goal. The key distinction lies in how many features from a particular tradition a poet chooses to replicate, and to what extent. The main traditions are Old English, Old Norse, or Middle English. Purist poets reproduce more features than notâŠand more strictly. Impressionist poets reproduce fewer features and less strictly. If a poem contains no recognizable metrical features from a particular tradition, thoughâŠwell then, maybe it can file a membership claim for the Rhyming Octosyllabic Revolution or Blank Verse-ism, but the Modern Alliterative Revival will have to pass.
My qualifier about a metrical feature, though, is an important one. Poems that merely borrow content from medieval history or (more commonly) adopt phrasing or diction often associated with alliterative verse, such as kennings, donât qualify as revivalist, at least for me, unless some concrete metrical feature is present. Features may include Sievers types, structural alliteration, a bipartite line structure, an accentual contour, or more. To my eye, most of Seamus Heaneyâs medieval-flavored poetry falls into the non-revivalist category. Although he often uses Old English phrases such as âbone-houseâ (OE: bÄnhĆ«s), itâs hard to see him applying medieval alliterative poetics in any consistent, discernible fashion.
Under my scale, then, Iâd rank âDear Tolkien Estateâ as a purist-leaning poem, a 2 or a 3 (for reference, The Fall of Arthur by Tolkien would be 1.5), and âThe Grail Questâ as 6 or 7. Thereâs nothing especially scientific about these numbers; theyâre only meant to jumpstart the conversation. And poets can easily move along the scale at will, up or down. Going back to Poul Anderson, Iâd rank âJ.R.R.Tâ a two and âRoute Song of the Winged Folkâ a nine. Although this latter text clearly shares kinship with the ljoĂ°ahĂĄttr form, itâs a long, long way from its Norse roots.
No matter where a poem falls on my revivalist-impressionist scale, though, let me stress that its ranking has nothing to do with literary merit. As mentioned before, âJ.R.R.Tâ seems rather bland to me but âRoute Songâ quite impressive. About the only undeniably true thing we can say about purist-leaning texts is that their authors, one way or another, consider authenticity important. As Boromir might say, one does not simply walk into Mordor. The alliterative meter takes effort, hard effort, and simply understanding the metrics behind the historical meter takes research and pain-staking application. If a poet goes to all that effort, they darn well have a reasonâŠand that reason often (but not always) involves subject.
For instance, Anderson normally prefers Old Norse meters, but âJ.R.R.Tâ appears in Old English meter because he is honoring an author, Tolkien, who himself prefers the Old English tradition. Ironically, given what I said earlier about the importance of concrete metrical features, subject matter is often a better indicator than metrics of the alliterative tradition being revived. This obviously holds true for impressionists, who rarely care much about historical metrical exactness, but context clues can even help with purists. For instance, metrically, there isnât much to distinguish Old English meter from Old Norse fornyrĂ°islag, so without an extra-metrical hint such as subject matter, itâs incredibly difficult to make that important interpretative distinction.
So thatâs my revivalist-impressionist scale. At this point, I can imagine one potentially loud objection, not against the scale itself, maybe, but against my claim that metrical fidelity has little to do with literary merit. Here goes: what if an impressionist is deviating from the historical metrics, not in deference to some special literary or linguistic reason, but because they donât have the foggiest notion what the historical metrics are? Any poet, after all, can start off a poem with âbibbidi-bobbidi-boo,â but such nonsense does not an alliterative poem make.
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...as opposed to the pizza. Image provided by Wise |
To which I respondâŠyeah. Sure. This could be true of an impressionist. Not every revivalist is a medievalist, and some revivalists know virtually nothing about the historical meters. No less an authority than W. H. Auden in The Age of Anxiety had to contend with accusations that he didnât properly understand Old English prosody, and even though he in fact did, the Modern Revival contains scores of poets who donât. For such folks, The Wanderer might as well be skaldic verse, and Piers Plowman is virtually identical with Peter Piper with his peck of pickled peppers.
Yet that doesnât usually matter. For a fun experiment, I want to tackle three different alliterative poems that fall quite heavily on the impressionist side of the scaleâŠand all by poets who, let us say, have a questionable grasp on their chosen alliterative tradition. To find out who I mean, though, tune in next week for the exciting reveal.
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