The recitation of poetry either by its author, a professional performer, or any other reader either alone or before an audience; the term normally implies the latter.
I. THEORY
The p. of poetry entails a performer, a setting, an audience, and a p. style. The term itself implies focus on the person performing, but in fact nearly all critical discussions (including this one) mainly concern the audience and its responses. Though poets naturally seem the most likely performers, from ancient times to at least the Ren., a class of professional performers or singers has usually been available for p. who have trained in delivery. The setting for p. may be a literary salon, a poetry workshop, a ceremonial civic or state occasion, or a quasi-theatrical p. at which a poet, poets, or performers address a wide public. By extension to electronic audio and visual media, ps. can also be disseminated via radio or television broadcasts; phonograph records, audio tapes, or compact disks; and videotapes or movies. A distinction should be made here between ps. which are live and static recordings thereof: the latter are merely fixed copies of but a single p. reduced in form and recoded into some machine lang..
It is also essential to distinguish between the p. of a poem and its composition. These two processes may or may not overlap. In the first case, the poetry presented in p. has already been transcribed as a written text, whether manuscript, scribal copy, or published book. This is the condition of nearly all modern, literary poetry: composition has been completed and the work has passed into textuality (q.v.). Here p. and composition are separated in temporal sequence.
In the second case, namely oral poetry (q.v.), no distinction exists between composition and p.: the “text” is spontaneously composed during p. by illiterate bards. Such a “text” is unique in every p. and is not normally recorded in any written form or even on tape except perhaps by scholars from Harvard. Successive recitations by even the same bard may draw upon the same story pattern, but the construction of scenes and selection of verbal details is different in every case; the choice of wording and phrasing is both controlled by—and assists—a stock of relatively fixed “formulas” (q.v.). These are at once both narrative and metrical building blocks, serving to construct both metrical lines and a coherent story. Here the written mode is simply absent. Even if one were to transcribe a recitation, the written record would be palpably derivative from only a single p. It should be noted that, in historical terms, the second class of course preceded the first—i.e. orality preceded the invention of writing, print technology, and the spread of literacy (reading). But even in modern literate cultures where written texts are widely published, spontaneous composition has re-emerged as a species of “secondary orality.”
The audience is the least understood component of all performative arts: Western poetics has taken virtually no interest in this subject. It is obvious, however, that audiences often bring with them significant sets of expectations about subject, diction, tone, and versification. As Wordsworth remarked, the poet who would write in a new style must create the audience by which it will be appreciated—or perish. Some audiences are trained, but most are not. The exact degree of audience comprehension of oral texts is unknown: some verse traditions, such as OE, apparently helped auditors recognize meter with musical chords, for example. In general, it would seem reasonable to assume that audiences cannot quickly process archaisms or unusual words, complex meters or heterometric stanza forms, or distanced rhymes or elaborate sonal interlace. On the other hand, sound patterns are very much obscured by orthography, particularly in a lang. such as Eng. Sound patterning can certainly be recognized as elaborate in p. even when it is not evident how, exactly, the sounds are structured. It is a question just how much of poetic form is perceived in oral transmission.
In one respect, however, audiences have an easier time with the recognition of meaning in oral texts. Chatman isolates a central difference between the reading and scansion of poems on the one hand and their p. on the other: in the former two activities, ambiguities of interp. can be preserved and do not have to be settled one way or the other (”disambiguated”). But in p., all ambiguities have to be resolved before or during delivery. Since the nature of p. is linear and temporal, sentences can only be read aloud once and must be given a specific intonational pattern. Hence in p., the performer is forced to choose between alternative intonational patterns and their associated meanings.
P. styles are one of the most interesting subjects in prosody and have direct connections to acting and articulation in the theater. Jakobson has distinguished between “delivery design” and “delivery instance,” the former set by verseform, the latter representing the features that are specific to each individual p. But between these lies the realm of expressive style. The two general classes of styles are realistic (naturalistic) and oratorical (declamatory, dramatic, rhapsodic, incantatory). C. S. Lewis once identified two types of performers of metrical verse: “Minstrels” (who recite in a wooden, singsong voice, letting scansion override sense) and “Actors” (who give a flamboyantly expressive recitation, ignoring meter altogether). And early in the 20th c., Robert Bridges argued that verses should be scanned in one way but read aloud another—clear Minstrelsy.
The triumph of naturalistic technique in modern drama has obscured the fact that artificial modes of delivery are well attested in antiquity, as reported by the grammarian Sacerdos (Keil 6.448). The evidence adduced by W. S. Allen (338-46) for “scanning pronunciation” and the demonstration of Ren. pedagogy by Attridge suggest that the practice of reciting verses aloud in an artificial manner has been more the rule than the exception in the West. Nevertheless, for dramatic verse which is metrical, particularly Shakespeare, actors learn that attention to scansion (qq.v.) will elucidate nuances of meaning in lines that a literal or natural delivery style will not manifest (see Hardison). Consequently, great actors learn how to convey both sense and meter together, so that each supports the other.
II. HISTORY
In Oriental poetry, the trad. of poetry presentation is esp. important in Chinese and Japanese poetry (qq.v.) and continues in 20th-c. Japan. Occidental poetry readings from the Greeks to the 19th c. have mainly favored invitational ps. in courtly settings. It is likely that ps. of poetry took place at the Alexandrian court of the Ptolemies (ca. 325-30 B.C. ) and, at Rome, in the aristocratic residences of C. Cilnius Maecenas (d. 8 B.C. ), who encouraged the work of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. In Petronius’ Satyricon, Tri-malchio first writes, then recites, his own “poetry” to the guests at his banquet.
The fifth of the five great divisions of Cl. rhet., after inventio (discovery), dispositio (arrangement), elocutio (style), and memoria (memorization), was pronuntiatio or delivery. This was less developed in antiquity than the first four subjects, though Aristotle discusses it, as do Cicero ( De inventione 1.9) and the Rhetorica ad Herennium (3.9), treating, like most subsequent rhetoricians, voice control and gesture. Quintilian devotes a lengthy chapter to the subject ( Institutio oratoria 11.3). The practice of reciting Lat. verses was encouraged by all the Med. Lat. grammarians and central to Ren. education.
The Occitan troubadours (q.v.) retained professional performers to recite their verses, though the poets of the Minnesang (q.v.) did not; other itinerant minstrels (q.v.) maintained themselves by recitation throughout the Middle Ages. Written poetry was recited at the 13th-c. court of Frederick II, in the Florentine circle of Lorenzo de’Medici (late 15th c.), and in the late 17th-c. salons of the Princes de Condé. In the 18th c., however, the patronage system gave way to one of public consumption of published books, and p. accordingly changed from a courtly to a public function. As a young poet of the late 1770s, Goethe read his work at the Weimar Court; on the occasion of a production of Faust to commemorate his 80th birthday in 1829, he personally coached the actors in the delivery of their lines. The 18th c. also witnessed the emergence of elocution as an important part of the theory of rhet.
In the 19th c., public recitations by both poets and their admirers became commonplace. The format was generally quasi-theatrical. Edgar Allan Poe in America, Victor Hugo in France, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson in England are examples of major poets noted for the dramatic quality of their readings. Tennyson is the earliest poet for whom we have an extant recording of a poet reading his own works. The work of Robert Browning was recited in meetings of the Browning Society (founded 1881), an organization which produced hundreds of offshoots in the U.S. in the 1880s and 1890s. A Goethe Gesellschaft (founded 1885) held readings in places as distant as St. Petersburg and New York. Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (musical version, 1867), based on the historical figure of Hans Sachs, brought the late medieval Ger. trad. of p. by members of craft guilds ( puys) to an international audience. Elocution was even further popularized in the 19th c.; the practice of reading aloud from lit. after dinner in Victorian households was widespread, since they were not yet subjected to the brutalities of television and stereo. Elocution led to the emergence in the 20th c of “oral interp.” as a formal activity in Am. university departments of speech.
The p. of poetry is central to symbolist poetics. Mallarmé read his poetry to a select audience on designated Tuesdays at which the poet himself played both host and reader in oracular style. While Mallarmé’s poetry was anything but spontaneously written, his ps. both personalized and socialized the work. Stefan George’s mode of delivery was consciously influenced by Mallarmé: the audience was restricted to the poet’s disciples ( Kreis ), and the occasion was perceived as cultic and sacral. George read from manuscript in a strictly rhapsodic style which disciples were required to follow.
In the 20th c., naturalistic or realistic delivery styles have owned the field. W. B. Yeats was much concerned with having his work sound spontaneous and natural. Though his delivery style was dramatic and incantatory, he deliberately revised some poems so that they would sound like an ordinary man talking. By contrast, T. S. Eliot’s ps. were aristocratic in style and tonally flat. The Wagnerian prescription of having the performer seem spontaneous in expression but personally remote had its best 20th-c. exemplar in Dylan Thomas, whose dramatic, incantatory style contrasted sharply with the plain, conversational style of Frost and Auden. Frost’s “sentence sounds” are the intonational patterns of colloquial speech, esp. as frozen into idioms—precisely the kind of speech effects that would be likely to come across well to audiences on Frost’s frequent reading tours. The many recordings of 20th-c. poets have by now defeated the instinctive belief of many that the poet will be his own best interpreter, or that the poem will open up at last when once we have heard it aloud. Several poets—Pound, Eliot—read in a monotone specifically intended to thwart those expectations.
Politically motivated poetry readings early in the 20th c. served as models for others to come in the second half of the century. Now the poetry p. is the vehicle for political resistance and social activism. In post-revolutionary Russia, Vladimir Majakovskij sang the praises of the October Revolution in lyrics written to be read aloud; his dramatic ps. attracted mass audiences both in Western Europe and the U.S. Avant-garde movements of the 1920s and ‘30s such as dada and surrealism (qq.v.) generated ps. of poetry staged simultaneously with music, dance, and film, and so adumbrated the intermedia ps. later in the century. Poetry readings of the 1950s and ‘60s often took the form of multi-media presentations and random artistic “Happenings.” Prominent innovators of the poetry p. in the 1950s were the Beat poets (q.v.), notably Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, all instrumental figures in the movement now known as the San Francisco Renaissance. Orality and p. were foregrounded in the poetics of Charles Olson, who conceived of the poem as a “field of action” and made his unit of measure the “breath group.” Olson’s “projective verse” (q.v.) found followers in Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov.
Since 1960, New York and San Francisco have been the two major Am. poetry p. centers, with London, Amsterdam, and West Berlin their European counterparts. In New York City, the poetry-reading movement of the 1960s generally associated with the name of Paul Blackburn served as a stimulus for a new vogue of poetry readings in other parts of the country, esp. in Chicago and the West Coast. Further experimentation with elements of recitation, music, song, digitized or synthesized sound, drama, mime, dance, and video, which are mixed, merged, altered, choreographed, or improvised in seriatim, simultaneous, random, or collage order, characterized the phenomena variously called sound poetry, language poetry (qq.v.), intermedia, or sometimes “p. art” of the 1970s and ‘80s. David Antin called his improvisations “talk poems.”
Since the 1950s, then, the p. of poetry in America has undergone a resurgence. Its tone ranges from conversational idioms to street lang. Poetry readings by one poet have become increasingly rare: “open poetry readings” are events to which anyone may bring work to read. Jazz or rock music, electronic audio and visual effects, and spontaneous dramatic presentations often accompany recitation. Consumption of alcohol or other drugs during the p. is not unknown. The ethos in intermedia events such as these is one of experimentation, liberation, and spontaneity. Like all postmodern literary genres, poetry retains a strong interest in p. as a reaction to academic formalism and its fixation on the text. It remains a paradox, however, that the new oral poetry has by and large chosen to disseminate its own works not on cassette or even video tapes but rather in traditional print—book—form.
The heritage of all the various forms of post modernism in America has been a turning away from the autonomy (q.v.) of the text and the presumption that a text presents one determinate meaning or its author’s intended meaning toward the more fluid, less determinate, free play of readerly responses to texts. Hence critical interest has shifted from written documents to ps. as experiences. It should not be thought, however, that meaning is therefore removed: rather, it is merely relocated from the more patient and reflective process of reading and coming-to-understand a poem on the page to the more immediate, rapid, sequential process of trying to follow the poem when delivered aurally. Whether the meaning that is thus provided in p. is more or less extensive or fulfilling to auditors as opposed to readers is a judgment that only auditors and readers may make. Nevertheless, many audiences still consider the p. of poetry a communal, nearly sacral event for heightened speech, investing the poet with the transportive powers of the vates (q.v.). And many readers and teachers of poetry continue to believe that poetry achieves its body only when given material form, as sound (q.v.), in the air, aloud.
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