NEW POETS OF RUM RAM RUF: Purists vs. Impressionists

One oddity about the Modern Revival is that, historically, critics don’t normally categorize literary movements according to poetic form alone. For instance, we don’t talk about the “Rhyming Octosyllabic Revolution” of Anglo-Norman England, or the “Blank Verse-ism” of the Elizabethan stage. This oddity has been one reason (out of several) some medievalists have challenged the notion of an “alliterative revival” in the mid-14^th century at all. After all, no medieval source ever mentions such a movement. The whole idea is a hypothesis put forth by modern scholars. Although my Brit Lit I survey course in college confidently taught the mid-14^th century revival as accepted fact, quite a few recent scholars have argued that just because various late medieval poems share a certain set of metrical similarities, they needn’t constitute an actual community of poets with similar attitudes or aims. The whole notion of metrical revivalism in the later Middle Ages is, therefore, a shot in the dark that misses – badly. Or so the argument goes.

Luckily, with everyone’s favorite modern revival, we stand on surer ground. Even if William Langland, say, didn’t necessarily rub elbows with the Gawain-poet, many contemporary revivalists believe he did … and most have no trouble imagining their own revivalism in parallel terms with the alleged 14^th-century movement.

That raises an interesting question, though. Despite the alliterative meter fading out of common usage by the 16^th century, alliteration itself has remained a tried-and-true device for English-language poets. What, then, separates a genuine revivalist poet from one who merely adds a little ornamental alliteration to their lines – i.e., an extra flourish of “rum ram ruf” for special effect?

Just my last two blog entries alone show how tricky this question can be. In “Dear Tolkien Estate,” Schaubert’s metrics would have made any Old English poet proud. No medieval poet, however, would recognize Majmudar’s “The Grail Quest” as a valid alliterative text. Yet it clearly is a 21^st-century revivalist poem. The problem isn’t only that the alliterative meter requires more than just alliteration (although some medievalists such Eric Weiskott, in fact, have argued against alliteration serving any real metrical function in the co-called “alliterative” meter). The problem is that individual revivalists can vary widely – and inconveniently, at least for critics who want to study this stuff – on exactly which features of the medieval alliterative meter they wish to revive.

One way to tackle this conundrum is by imagining an informal metrical scale that ranges 1 through 10, from arch-purists to extreme impressionists. Generally speaking, the latter group has little interest in faithfully reproducing the historical meter. For the purists, though, such fidelity does matter because they necessarily consider metrical fidelity a part of their overall literary goal. The key distinction lies in how many features from a particular tradition a poet chooses to replicate, and to what extent. The main traditions are Old English, Old Norse, or Middle English. Purist poets reproduce more features than not … and more strictly. Impressionist poets reproduce fewer features and less strictly. If a poem contains no recognizable metrical features from a particular tradition, though … well then, maybe it can file a membership claim for the Rhyming Octosyllabic Revolution or Blank Verse-ism, but the Modern Alliterative Revival will have to pass.

My qualifier about a metrical feature, though, is an important one. Poems that merely borrow content from medieval history or (more commonly) adopt phrasing or diction often associated with alliterative verse, such as kennings, don’t qualify as revivalist, at least for me, unless some concrete metrical feature is present. Features may include Sievers types, structural alliteration, a bipartite line structure, an accentual contour, or more. To my eye, most of Seamus Heaney’s medieval-flavored poetry falls into the non-revivalist category. Although he often uses Old English phrases such as “bone-house” (OE: bānhūs), it’s hard to see him applying medieval alliterative poetics in any consistent, discernable fashion.

Under my scale, then, I’d rank “Dear Tolkien Estate” as a purist-leaning poem, a 2 or a 3 (for reference, The Fall of Arthur by Tolkien would be 1.5), and “The Grail Quest” as 6 or 7. There’s nothing especially scientific about these numbers; they’re only meant to jumpstart the conversation. And poets can easily move along the scale at will, up or down. Going back to Poul Anderson, I’d rank “J.R.R.T” a two and “Route Song of the Winged Folk” a nine. Although this latter text clearly shares kinship with the ljoðaháttr form, it’s a long, long way from its Norse roots.

No matter where a poem falls on my revivalist-impressionist scale, though, let me stress that its ranking has nothing to do with literary merit. As mentioned before, “J.R.R.T” seems rather bland to me but “Route Song” quite impressive. About the only undeniably true thing we can say about purist-leaning texts is that their authors, one way or another, consider authenticity important. As Boromir might say, one does not simply walk into Mordor. The alliterative meter takes effort, hard effort, and simply understanding the metrics behind the historical meter takes research and pain-staking application. If a poet goes to all that effort, they darn well have a reason … and that reason often (but not always) involves subject.

For instance, Anderson normally prefers Old Norse meters, but “J.R.R.T” appears in Old English meter because he is honoring an author, Tolkien, who himself prefers the Old English tradition. Ironically, given what I said earlier about the importance of concrete metrical features, subject matter is often a better indicator than metrics of the alliterative tradition being revived. This obviously holds true for impressionists, who rarely care much about historical metrical exactness, but context clues can even help with purists. For instance, metrically, there isn’t much to distinguish Old English meter from Old Norse fornyrðislag, so without an extra-metrical hint such as subject matter, it’s incredibly difficult to make that important interpretative distinction.

So that’s my revivalist-impressionist scale. At this point, I can imagine one potentially loud objection, not against the scale itself, maybe, but against my claim that metrical fidelity has little to do with literary merit. Here goes: what if an impressionist is deviating from the historical metrics, not in deference to some special literary or linguistic reason, but because they don’t have the foggiest notion what the historical metrics are? Any poet, after all, can start off a poem with “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,” but such nonsense does not an alliterative poem make.

To which I respond … yeah. Sure. This could be true of an impressionist. Not every revivalist is a medievalist, and some revivalists know virtually nothing about the historical meters. No less an authority than W. H. Auden in The Age of Anxiety had to contend with accusations that he didn’t properly understand Old English prosody, and even though he in fact did, the Modern Revival contains scores of poets who don’t. For such folks, The Wanderer might as well be skaldic verse, and Piers Plowman is virtually identical with Peter Piper with his peck of pickled peppers.

Yet that doesn’t usually matter. For a fun experiment, I want to tackle three different alliterative poems that fall quite heavily on the impressionist side of the scale … and all by poets who, let us say, have a questionable grasp on their chosen alliterative tradition. To find out who I mean, though, tune in next week for the exciting reveal.