Alliterative Verse / Avant-Garde

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This symbol (/), the virgule, was often the only mark of punctuation used by medieval scribes copying English poetry. The virgule is the ancestor of the comma. Rather than indicating mutually exclusive alternatives, as in some cases in modern usage, the scribes’ virgule connected things. Like a virgule, this collection connects things. The bodies of work it connects are alliterative verse, an early poetic tradition exemplified in Beowulf, and contemporary North American avant-garde poetry.

The connection between alliterative verse and contemporary poetry is not a matter of sourcing. It is not that contemporary poets thrill to the subtleties of Winner and Waster, an alliterative poem from the 1350s. Instead, the two bodies of poetry belong together because, for 21st-century readers, they both push the envelope of what poetry can be and do. This collection is broken into sections by theme, and each section connects contemporary poems with alliterative poems.

Elizabeth Willis, in her extraordinary book-closing poem “In Strength Sweetness,” from Address (2011), explores the possibilities of constructing each line out of two halves, separated by a virgule—just as the stunningly lyrical Old English Dream of the Rood mixes and matches elements across the caesura while building to code within the conventions of Old English prosody. In the verse sequence titled “what if,” embedded within Just Us (2020), a book largely written as prose, Claudia Rankine investigates contrafactual hypotheticals, or “what-ifs.” So does William Langland in his 14th-century alliterative dream vision Piers Plowman, a poem that is one big hypothetical, one big what-if that keeps bursting in episode after episode. Langland, like Rankine, wrote in a combination of prose and verse, playing the affordances of the two forms off each other. Prageeta Sharma writes through privation of the stable fictional subjectivity characteristic of earlier and contemporary mainstream lyric poetry—just as Langland wrote around and rewrote his I until it splintered into 20 possible selves. Read together, the short Old English poems “Cædmon’s Hymn” and “Wulf and Eadwacer,” the first as straightforward as the second is riddlic, approach a Sharma-like confrontation of the bases and limits of claiming an I or a we.

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The verse form used in two of the best-loved poems of the English Middle Ages, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is defined as “alliterative meter.” Today, these narratives of war, monstrosity, and humanity inspire Hollywood; back then, they entranced readers who encountered them in the pages of manuscript (handwritten) books or, perhaps, declaimed aloud in an aristocratic hall. Alliterative verse, defined in the paragraphs that follow, was the first poetic tradition in the English language. For many centuries, it was also the only tradition. Alliterative verse faded away in the 16th century with the rise of the syllable-counting meters associated with Shakespeare, such as iambic pentameter. An older strand of English poetics had frayed, while a newer one held strong—for a time. The transference of cultural power from one verse form to others was gradual and momentous.

Before the ascendance of Chaucerian and Shakespearean forms, English-language poetry sounded like this:

This text is from “Bede’s Death Song,” a short wisdom poem attributed to the eighth-century scholar Bede. Bolded text in the quotation indicates alliterating sounds, which adorn the peaks of the rhythmic shape of the line like splashes of color. The form and history of alliterative meter have been controversial since scholars first began to study medieval English literature.¹ An attractive hypothesis about its fundamental verse form is that the earliest instances of alliterative meter (such as “Bede’s Death Song”) count from one to four under very special conditions of counting. At its simplest, a verse is four syllables: (1) thonc-,(2) -snot-, (3) -tur-,(4) -ra. Or a verse can reach four through the grouping of unstressed syllables together: (1) than him, (2) tharf, (3) si-, (4) -e.

After the promotion of syllable-counting meters, English poetry looks and sounds more and more recognizable to present-day English speakers (and the meter is less difficult to characterize). Part of the difference has to do with tectonic changes in the English language itself from the eighth century to the present. Another part has to do with an adjustment to the ecosystem of meters in poetic practice.

Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight come from opposite ends of the Middle Ages. Beowulf, composed in the 8th, 9th, or 10th centuries, was written in what is now called Old English; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, composed in the 14th century, is in Middle English. Literary time is deep and textured, even within the post-medieval concept of the “Middle Ages.” A lot happened to English and to England in between Beowulf and Gawain, thus a lot happened to poetry.

Reflecting the circumstances of their patchy circulation in early manuscript culture, most alliterative poems are anonymous and undatable. Because alliterative verse is defunct, and because poets writing in English at this time did not author treatises describing their metrical and aesthetic designs, the alliterative tradition is mysterious. Contemporary readers know a lot, in fact, about how this poetry was put together, but what is known is all inference hazarded after the fact. Scholars know that the metrical line used in Beowulf is a pair of half lines, each consisting of four metrical constituents called “metrical positions.” The 14th-century meter of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is different. It is not a count of positions, and the two halves of the line are rhythmically asymmetrical, rather than symmetrical as in Beowulf. Readers can spot the imbalance on the page straight away, provided the midline break or “caesura” is marked graphically.

Stark differences between the meter of Beowulf and the meter of Gawain pose a riddle: are these forms even related? The question has long been open in the field. Recent metrical scholarship answers yes.

Alliterative verse cuts across many genres of writing practiced in medieval England. In this collection, you will find lengthy heroic poetry, dream visions, charms, riddles, romances, a prophecy, and a lurid retelling of a historical siege. The Wanderer, an undated Old English poem sometimes slapped with the Greek label elegy, is a wistful dramatic monologue of medium length. The anonymous Winner and Waster and William Langland’s Piers Plowman form a fearsome duo. These mid-14th-century poems, the latter inspired by the former, present political allegory encased within dream vision. In a dream vision, a first-person I wanders out to the countryside, falls asleep, and has a disturbingly surreal dream (or several). Langland’s Piers Plowman, the longer and more ambitious of the two, is among the most electrifying works of English literature and should be read in whole or in part as a lightning-like opposite of Geoffrey Chaucer’s genteelly sarcastic Canterbury Tales. 

Where Chaucer (a bureaucrat) insulates himself from his own characters by using a literary frame, Langland (shadowy son of a wealthy family slumming it as a clerk in minor orders with perhaps less to lose) tends to place his avatar in the gravest moral and political danger by inserting him into high-stakes discussions of the big topics of the day: Church, government, sin, social justice, and the nature of divinity. Langland’s method of scrutinizing then-contemporary politics, such as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which Karma Lochrie termed “negative utopianism,” is to lift readers 20 feet off the ground and make them believe for one precious instant that they will not come crashing down along with everything else.²Piers Plowman enfolds the whole world, human and animal, in its violent oscillations between incompatible premises.

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Elizabeth Willis’s “In Strength Sweetness” evokes a contemporary function of the virgule, which is to mark line breaks in quotations from poetry. Thus, each line of “In Strength Sweetness” has double consciousness, one line and two lines, recalling—recalling in a dream, not through overt reference—the double consciousness of the immersive springtime lyric “A Bird in Bishopswood,” a poem that expresses a wondrous expansion and leisure cut into by an oppressive awareness of unfulfilled desire. This poem was discovered scribbled on the back of a rental account for St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1395, a suggestive juxtaposition of sublimity and the everyday, and one resonant with Willis’s tastes more than six centuries later. So many of the poems brought together here, premodern and contemporary, travel that circuit between paying rent and creating art: the demands of the aesthetic economy balanced uneasily against the demands of the economy-economy. The 20th- and 21st-century poems in this collection broach a transtemporal communication through which readers can receive “a modern letter sent from antiquity” (Willis, “Tiptoe Lightning”). Certain time-bending passages in St. Erkenwald and other alliterative poems anticipate the linkage, as if these distant poems were expecting us all along.

¹ See Ian Cornelius, Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

² Karma Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 164.