Re: kafka and rilke

I just finished a rather nice response and my browser crashed.

Blah.

Anyway, to start, I'm only talking about the tradition in English (just
for John O's sake) since I have no knowledge of world music. I suspect
the Italian tradition is very similar to the English (it very strongly
influenced the English), which I'm going to discuss below.

Yes, I was using the words "early modern" to refer to the 16th/17th
centuries. Some may push it back a bit. You're right, though, people
who study different subjects or time periods use the words "early
modern" in different ways.

Probably the best example of poetry meant to be "read quietly" is some
of the poetry of George Herbert (1593-1633). He wrote "the Altar" in
the shape of a simple, column shaped altar, and the poem "Easter Wings"
look just like that -- wings -- when turned on its side.

This is significant because I don't think a sharp distinction between
song and poetry could exist until poetry that was meant to be read
quietly started being circulated.

John Donne, for example, used the word "song" to denote lyrical poetry,
as did William Blake and Wordsworth about 200 years later. "Ballads,"
which existed in English from at least the 13th century, were also poems
with lyrical qualities that could be sung with or without musical
accompaniment.

At any rate, this is the background behind my comment that the word
"song" in the very narrow sense that you advocate is a very recent
invention; before the 19th and 20th century there wasn't a clear cut
distinction between song and poetry.

I don't think it's wise to draw that sharp a distinction between "song"
and "chant" if we want to discuss the common use of the word "song"
these days -- most people probably see chant as a special type of song.

Heck, look at this history of "Caedmon's Hymn" (7th century?) in the
Norton Anthology of English Literature:

"Bede tells how Caedmon, and illiterate cowherd employed by the
monastery of Whitby, miraculously received the gift of song, entered the
monastery, and became the founder of a school of Christian poetry.
Caedmon was clearly an oral-formulaic poet, one who created his work by
combining and varying fomulas -- units of verse developed in a tradition
transmitted by one generation of singers to another" (p. 19, 5th ed.).

It's clear there's no distinction between song and poetry to this writer
-- not so much because he's a 20th century author and the 20th century
doesn't recognize this distinction, but because the distinction was
irrelevant to the time period he was writing about.

I think it's not so much a matter of people not "thinking about" writing
their poems down, or creating visual effects, but _why_ they wouldn't
think about it. Most were illiterate, and it's a simple fact that the
best way to memorize a string of words is to set them to some kind of
music, even if no instrument is available. Most poetry arose from an
oral tradition that required, then, that the poetry be set to music,
intended to be memorized and read or sung aloud to illiterate audiences
by illiterate poets.

Jim

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Received on Sun Jun 29 08:52:01 2003