Poetry and Its Others by Jahan Ramazani;

Author:Jahan Ramazani; [Ramazani, Jahan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

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POETRY AND SONG

For all the interconnections between poetry and prayer, between poetry and the news, and between poetry and the novel, theory, and the law, song has long been conceived as poetry’s closest generic kin. Turning from the news, a powerful but younger and more distant cousin, to prayer, an older, closer relative with many resemblances, and now to song, poetry’s closest “sister” genre, we have been exploring poetry in proximity to ever closer family relations. Even so, the question of poetry’s kinship with song may seem an unlikely framework within which to explore modern and contemporary poems. The primal unity between song and lyric poetry (the Greek lyrikos meaning “singing to the lyre”) is often said to have been fractured long ago by written texts and then exploded by print culture. In Giorgio Agamben’s history of European lyric, “the poetic text’s definitive break with song (that is, with the element Dante called melos)” came around the twelfth century, when a poem became “essentially graphic.”1 Emphasizing English texts, James William Johnson dates this “crucial metamorphosis” later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when “the poet ceased to ‘compose’ his or her poem for musical presentation but instead ‘wrote’ it for a collection of readers”; now suited “to a visual as well as an auditory medium,” the lyric “found itself bereft of the very element which had been the foundation of its lyricism—music.”2 The divide is said to have occurred still later in postcolonial African and Caribbean societies, which had rich traditions of oral poetry but took up literary verse to a significant degree only in the twentieth century. Whether the “story of the separation between song and speech” is set in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or modernity, it is haunted by the possibility of a split even at the point of origin, according to Jacques Derrida: “Degeneration as separation, severing of voice and song, has always already begun.”3

Some modernist writers in the West—of European, African, and mixed ancestry—were intent on healing this fundamental breach, even though they often betrayed an ambivalence toward song that persists in contemporary poetry. Drawing on Homeric and Irish bardic examples, Yeats sought to return a musical orality to poetry and reverse the modern tyranny of the eye over the ear. He proposed a method of words spoken to delicate accompaniment on the psaltery. Yet he was emphatic that it must not stray into singing, which obscured sense behind sound and marred poetry’s internal music. Song and print were a Scylla and Charybdis that the living poem must navigate: “I have always known that there was something I disliked about singing,” begins his essay “Speaking to the Psaltery,” “and I naturally dislike print and paper.”4 Yeats explained that “when I heard anything sung I did not hear the words, or if I did their natural pronunciation was altered and their natural music was altered, or it was drowned in another music which I did not understand. What was the good of writing a love-song if

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