![]() Those imitators of Greek culture, the Romans, not only adopted the pedagogical practices of their models, but also integrated it into their military training, wherein the legionnaires, wielding weapons and wearing armour twice the weight of the usual, drilled chanting and stepping in time, a performance in line with the diction of The Iliad that describes the fighting of its heroes as a war dance. ![]() The study of poetry in school finds an important precursor in the memorization of the Homeric epics in antique Athens, where schoolboys would learn the poems through a combination of stamping their feet and gesturing. This seated dance mimicked the more recognizable one of the tragic chorus whose dance steps were timed to its chanted lines, a performance descended from the ritualistic origins of classical drama. The study of scansion is inherited from the days when education included the parsing of Greek and Latin verses both in terms of their grammar and their meter. The traditional manner of describing a poem’s prosody is scansion, the analysis of the line into its constituent feet and their stresses. The connection between poetry and dance is at least as time-honoured as that of poetry with song. Of course, reciting a poem demands more than just speaking its words: posture (standing or sitting, for example), facial expression, and gesture, all bodily movements, are included, all aspects of the poem’s performance here conceived as dance. After all, reciting a poem demands the articulation of the phonemes that constitute its utterance by means of the complex but no less describable movement of the vocal organs and their parts. The written text of a poem imagined this way is not a musical score but a choreography. Instead of equating poetry with song one could as easily characterize the recitation of a poem as a dance, not of the whole body but, at a minimum, the vocal apparatus. ![]() And to “connect” each line to a breath is belated at best, questionably phonocentric at worst. Sadly, such homespun poetics appear more the rule than the exception. When he goes on to equate words with notes in a song, he departs from the identification or metaphor he starts with (or, more charitably, develops it along his own lines for his own purposes) as songs notate, more or less, the syllables of their words. ![]() Likewise, that “every word in every line must work” (though clearly intended prescriptively) states little more than the principle of parsimony, an element of literary competence, the assumption that no element of a work of art is nonfunctional. The identification of poetry with song is threadbare and, in a sense, disingenuous, unless he really is setting words to music. Whatever the merits of Adamson’s poetry, this observation on the art of poetry is just plain hokey. Recently, a friend shared a link to an interview with Australian poet Robert Adamson citing this remark on craft as a teaser: “Poetry is song, every word in every line must work, each word transcribed like a note, each line connected to a breath.” ![]()
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