Podcast: English-Language Poetry

Participants:Nicholas Carlie – programlederCharles Ivan Armstrong – professor at the University of Agder/author

Poetry in English

Programleder: Hi, I’m Nicholas Carlie. Today, we’ll be talking about poetry in the English language. I will be speaking to Professor Charles Ivan Armstrong of the University of Agder. He has published books on poetry as well as on poets such as William Butler Yeats. We’ll be discussing how poetry has changed over the years, if it must rhyme all the time, who some of the most important English-speaking poets in history are, and what poetry looks like today.

Programleder: So, I’m speaking with Professor Charles Ivan Armstrong, who has spent a lot of his professional life studying English poetry. How are you today, Charles?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: I’m great, Nicholas. Thanks very much.

Programleder: It’s a big subject – it is! So, what do we know about how old English poetry is? Do we have a starting point?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Well, I think today most anthologies would start in medieval times, maybe in the 13th century. They’re written in what we call Middle English – before Modern English – and there are some notable examples there, the beginning of a literary tradition, in that period. It is particularly interesting that a lot of the poetry from this period is anonymous. So, some say the greatest poet in English is unknown or anonymous …

Programleder: Right?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Yes. I guess when we really start getting clearly identified authors is in the 14th century, when you have, in particular, John Gower, William Langland, and the most famous of them all in that period: Geoffrey Chaucer with The Canterbury Tales – it’s still a classic.

Programleder: And ‘Chaucer’ is a name I think a lot of people would recognise.

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Definitely. Yes, he’s a major figure.

Programleder: Is he probably one of the most important figures in English poetry? And are there a few other examples as well?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: I’d say he’s important, yes, because he’s the beginning of a national tradition, or a vernacular tradition. You have older poetry in English-speaking countries, but it would be in Latin. But he starts writing in English.Programleder: All right, yes …

Charles Ivan Armstrong: So, he’s a major figure. It’s hard to choose, but if I were to choose just maybe two more, I think William Shakespeare is hard to get around. He’s a fantastic poet. And since America has become a major force, I will maybe single out Walt Whitman, in the 19th century, as not the first important American poet but in many ways the beginning of a national tradition, a particular American kind of poetry.

Programleder: My preliminary research into the history of English poetry, it kind of gave me the impression that war, God, and love are big, big themes that kick off a lot of early poetry. Would that be correct, do you think?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Definitely! These are classic themes, and they still are – they still are. Unfortunately, perhaps, for war – it hasn’t left us, it’s still around.

Programleder: So, let’s talk about English specifically. How does the language lend itself to poetry?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: That’s a good question – a difficult question. I think people might be inclined to think of languages like French and Italian as being more poetic per se, to have more musical qualities and perhaps more possibilities of rhyme. I think one big strength for the English language is the way it’s got an enormous vocabulary, and it’s appropriated from a lot of different sources, you know, ranging from Latin and French to even Norwegian and Scandinavian languages. So, it’s a very wealthy language, and that creates a lot of possibilities for poets.

Programleder: Are there famous poets that we could learn more about, who were very good at describing the time they are writing their material in?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Yes, there are quite a lot. I’d say one of the movements or larger groups of poets I think of would be the war poets of the First World War. You mentioned that war is one of the big themes, and the First World War is a major event in world history. But it has a special place in British history too; it’s less overshadowed by the Second World War in Britain than it is in a lot of other countries. And there were some fantastic poets: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, David Jones, many others too, who wrote poems that were very gritty, very descriptive of the new forms of warfare at the time. They were also reacting to war with a new sensibility, often writing dejectedly about what war did to the cost of lives, what it did to the land and all sorts of other aspects of life.

Programleder: So, they’re opening up for criticism rather than being purely patriotic, then?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Absolutely. Yes, definitely! I mean, there are important poets at the time who wrote, shall we say, more nationalistic poems. But these are the ones that are remembered today, and people are still excited about them hundred years later.

Programleder: Were they well accepted in their own times?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Yes, and no. Siegfried Sassoon, for instance, was a conscientious objector, and actually had to go into a mental asylum. Not because he was crazy, but that was the only way, you know; it was either that or prison. So, they put him in a mental asylum. They were controversial, certainly, and some people felt they were undermining the war effort. But in hindsight, now looking back, a lot of people accept their criticism and certainly feel they were doing something new, too, with poetry, to the degree of realism. They also captured what we today call PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, or what they called a shell shock at the time. They captured this in quite incredible ways in their poetry and are even cited in books on these kinds of mental problems today.

Programleder: Has there been a golden era of poetry? I know maybe modern poetry now, if somebody would tell me they were really into poetry, they would be a part of a smaller group – maybe a language group or a literature group. But has there been a golden era when it was popular for everybody?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Yeah, it’s a good question. I’d say the 19th century is an important time for poetry’s status worldwide. During the Romantic era, between roughly 1790 and 1830, poetry had huge status, and a lot of the most important writers are writing poetry – writers like William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake. The role of the poet was quite elevated. The poet was seen as somebody who was inspired and had a kind of mental power and capability, that perhaps we are more sceptical about these days. This continues a good bit into the 19th century. There were great British poets like Tennyson, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti – all of these were major figures who were read by huge parts of society. But at that time, too, though, the novel starts gaining ground because of new ways of circulating texts and new reading habits. And so, during the 19th century – gradually, if you like – poetry’s central place as a literary genre is being contested by prose, and particularly the novel.

Programleder: I have teenage sons, and they sometimes recite lines from hip-hop artists for me, which can blow me away as far as rhyming and even the structure of a sentence. Would you consider Tupac or Eminem as kind of poets?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s interesting: in some contexts, rap is where rhyming still survives as a technique, and it has traditionally been a key part of poetry. I remember the Nobel Prize winner in 1995, Seamus Heaney, famously said that Eminem was a notable poet. And of course, there’s a long tradition of poetry and song, poetry and music. Just think of Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize quite recently for literature. I think rap music is continuing. So, I think it’s a valid point that rap music in some ways is a particularly interesting way of keeping poetic traditions alive today.

Programleder: I know, growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, poetry for me was definitely the rhyming version. But there’s so much more to it, isn't there? About the structure of poetry, and there are many rules and ways you can write poetry without necessarily having to rhyme?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Definitely. Definitely. You know, Whitman was one of the figures who first started loosening up things. With literary modernism and writers like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, we associate so-called free verse, which is verse that doesn’t have to rhyme or follow a set metre, but still has a kind of musicality and interest in itself. Having said that, a lot of poets write both free verse and make use of traditional forms and genres. Robert Frost, the American poet, famously said that writing poetry without rhyme or rhythm was like playing tennis without a net. He would say the challenge is part of the interest and what makes it exciting. So, I’d say even today, a lot of poets think there’s lots of interesting things you can do with the traditional forms still and keep developing them. I mentioned one notable poet there, there’s an Irish American poet called Paul Muldoon, who is very inventive, very free, but often in a way redoing traditional forms and reworking them in interesting ways.

Programleder: I suspect a lot more people would play tennis if it weren’t for the obstacle of the net, ha ha.

Charles Ivan Armstrong: And maybe, maybe, we just lose interest. Ha ha.

Programleder: Do we also have a responsibility to look into other cultures than our own, like the white European or American poems, which are very prominent in our society? Are there certain poets we should be seeking out, who probably weren’t as big in our own society, but still have a lot to give and teach us about poetry?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Certainly, there are lots of interesting poets who come from a place outside that mainstream. A particularly important one would be the West Indian poet Derek Walcott, who was a remarkable poet building both on tradition but also on local traditions in the West Indies, in terms of nature and local versions of English. Another poet often brought up is an American poet, Langston Hughes, who was part of the so-called Harlem Renaissance early in the 20th century. He explored, in some ways, the borderlines between an earlier form of popular music, the rhythm and blues and poetry on the British Isles. You have somebody like L. K. – Linton Kwesi Johnson – who is known to many people as a recording artist, but is also somebody who, in a kind of dub reggae format, makes use of a lot of traditional poetic tools and instruments. And in more recent times, of course a lot of people saw Amanda Gorman at Biden’s inauguration, a proud African American poet with a poem that works really strongly in that context as a verbal performance. She’s just the last of a long tradition of poets who come from outside this mainstream of UK and American white poetry.

Programleder: So, professor, I’m going to put a little bit of pressure on you now: If I was going to begin reading poetry, let’s say ‘poetry for dummies’ – the 1 A, Year one – where would you send me? What would you like me to start with to kind of whet my appetite for this amazing and very, very broad subject?

Charles Ivan Armstrong: That’s a really difficult one, ha ha!

Programleder: I’m sorry, but you know that you are the professor, so we have to ask somebody.

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Yes, I think there’s nothing wrong in starting with whatever’s closest to you. If you like rap music, why don’t you look at the lyrics? Start looking at those lyrics, spend some time on them, see what works in the language. If you want to go to something that you haven’t looked at before and is a bit less familiar, poetry has a long tradition. One of the strengths of poetry is that it brings us to distant times and distant places. One favourite of mine would be William Blake, the romantic poet who wrote two sets of poems that are often published together: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, which are quite simple poems written in the 1790s and yet quite rich and short too.

Programleder: So, if we were to sum it up a bit then: look at your favourite lyricists or rap artists and study their lyrics. Don’t forget the classics, and obviously one has to remember William Shakespeare.

Charles Ivan Armstrong: Sounds good, Nicholas.

Produsert av Både og for NDLA