READING ASSIGNMENT FOR OCTOBER 13
The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
Who’s the greatest poet of them all? There’s Homer, there’s Dante, there’s Shakespeare – names that would make just about everyone’s short list. And then there’s Anon. That might be a new name to you, but chances are you already know something about the body of work. Anon (otherwise known as Anonymous) is the author of some of the most imperishable poetry in every language, and all of the most venerable poems that have come down to us through the oral tradition. Anon composed the Babylonian epic poem Gilgamesh, the immense Hindu epic in Sanskrit The Mahabharata, and the Old English narrative poem Beowulf. Anon’s the one who crafted the folk ballads of England and Scotland, and sang them over and over in what we now call “ballad measure” before anyone wrote them down. Anon’s the poet laureate behind the ancient Egyptian work songs that date back several millennia; the Hebrew psalms that were later collected in Biblical scripture; and all sorts of chants and carols, spells and riddles, prayers and laments, drinking songs and sea chanteys, nursery rhymes and lullabys that are still with us because they survived for generations by word of mouth until they were finally set in cold type.
You get the idea. There is no “greatest poet,” even if some of the giants whose shoulders we stand on loom larger than others. And Anon, of course, is the expedient shorthand that we use to personify that vast lineage of poets from living or dead tongues whose names and identities are forever lost to us. Yet the fact that so much of Anon’s poetry can still be found on our shelves and in our heads tells us something vitally important about the power and persistence of the human impulse to make our voices heard in rhythmical lines – or, as Robert Pinsky has it in The Sounds of Poetry, “the way an extraordinary system of grunts and mouth-noises evolved by the human primate has been used as the material of art.”
For this reading assignment in The Rattle Bag anthology, please turn back to the Index of Poets and Works. You’ll see that the first full page and a bit of the next one are all poems from the hand of Anon. I’d like you to read as many of them as you can, ideally out loud and preferably in one sitting. How come? First and foremost, because many of them are good, and good in ways that you might find surprising or disarming. For another thing, reciting Anonymous poetry provides us with a perfect opportunity to experience poetic expression in its most pure and primal state: since there’s no way of knowing who wrote these lines or exactly when and where they were composed, all they ask of us is that we lend them our ears and give them the chance (to paraphrase John Keats) to prove themselves on our pulses. And there’s a practical incentive for hearing them out too: Anon is a masterful tutor, with all kinds of handy things to teach us about the tools and tricks of the trade and expressing ourselves artfully and memorably in the medium of lines.
But just don’t take my word for it. Read an assortment of them aloud to yourself as you jump from page to page and age to age in keeping with the anthology format, and see whether you feel that these authorless poems still have the stamp of authority as memorable speech. Take a few moments to jot down the titles that made the strongest impression on you, making note of particular formal or audible devices and designs those poems are employing to grab your attention and hold your interest on their own terms. I have my own thoughts and ideas about how Anon’s poems can still be instructive for us at this late date, but I think it would be worthwhile for all of you to share some of your own gut reactions as you warm to the task of picking up where Anon left off.