Ancient & modern
Andrew Motion’s tenure as Poet Laureate is about to end, and the search for a successor has begun. It is accompanied with the usual tidal wave of claptrap about this not being ‘the sort of job which any real poet would want’ and the importance of not involving public opinion in the choice.
What is it about modern poets that they feel so threatened by the idea of public opinion? Ancient Greeks would have thought them barking. When in Homer’s Odyssey the pigman Eumaeus reported to Penelope the effect that the (disguised) Odysseus’s stories had on him, he says, ‘Sitting in my hut, he held me spellbound. It was like fixing my eyes on a minstrel who has been taught by the gods to sing words that bring delight to mortals, and everyone longs to hear him when he sings.’ The point is that poetry was special language: stylised, tonal, rhythmical, elevated, and with a peculiar power to charm. Since time immemorial poetic utterance (often accompanied by dance and music) had been the way to celebrate special occasions, private and public, from entertainment at symposia, invoking the gods and shaping magic spells to proclaiming the heroic deeds of winners at Olympia and celebrating festivals of the gods, especially at the great spectacles of tragic and comic drama held in honour of the god Dionysus.
And this poetry was not easy. Pindar’s poems, composed in honour of the winners at the four major games festivals, are fantastically dense and complex, their leaps of thoughts stratospheric, their range of reference huge. Patrons pleaded with him to write for them and paid vast sums for the privilege. The language of Greek tragedy, especially the choruses, was no less demanding and thrilling. Plutarch tells us that some Athenian soldiers captured in Sicily in 413 BC won their freedom by reciting chunks of Euripides that they knew by heart.
In his Politics, Aristotle supports a democratic angle on the issue, arguing that everyone has some share in ability and intelligence, so that when they are brought together ‘their collective pronouncement is a judgment on all parts’. That, he concludes, is why ‘the many are better judges of works of music and poetry’.
In the ancient Greek world, poetry was a popular, public medium, and popularity was what poets longed for. If modern poets do not want to be popular, so be it. They can starve in
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