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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page xi
nations and peoples. When we read Katherine Philips's "On the death of my first and dearest childe," William Wordsworth's sonnet on how it "getting and spending" we ''lay waste our powers," or Philip Larkin's lyrics on the banalities of contemporary life, we come into contact with the struggles that fill the lives the poets led, and the lives we now lead. Poems like these offer at least a glimpse of how to come to terms with the stuff of our lives, moments of suffering, of clarity, of hopelessness, of promise. This poetry bridges the centuries, and bridges the differencesracial, national, religious, sexual, economicthat potentially divide those of us who share a language.
We imagine many kinds of readers of this book. Students of British poetry, undergraduate and graduate, will find here a useful overview. Specialists in periods or poets will encounter new perspectives and new voices. But the book has also been designed for what both Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf have called "the common reader." For some readers, this volume may renew acquaintance with poets long forgotten; for others, it may offer an introduction to poems never before encountered. Brief biographies, suggestions for further readings, and a list of standard editions of the poets' works should make it easier for readers to investigate specific poets or poems independently. Above all, we hope that this volume offers a clearer sense of where British poetry has come from, and where it may be going.
CARL WOODRING
JAMES SHAPIRO
 
Page 1
Old English Poetry
Roberta Frank
The Old English poems that have come down to us were composed over the course of four centuries (roughly 6801100)a span almost as long as that of the Roman Empire and about half that of all the succeeding periods of English poetry combined. Duration is distinction of a sort. So are great age and size. No current European literature can point to an extensive body of verse nearly so old. Some thirty thousand lines of Old English poetry have been preserved, occupying many hundreds of pages in the standard edition.
Anglo-Saxon vernacular culture was notably sophisticated, aristocratic, and mature. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to his fellow poet Robert Bridges: "I am learning Anglo-Saxon and it is a vastly superior thing to what we have now." (By recent convention, the term
Old English
is used for the language and vernacular texts of pre-Conquest England,
Anglo-Saxon
, for the people and culture.) W. H. Auden reported being "spellbound" by his first experience of Old English: ''This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish."
Scholarly tradition wants us to speak well of the works we study. There would be little point in talking about something that was not beautiful and truthful, not "interesting." Old English poetry has interestalmost too much interestbut its beauty is not in the usual places.
The verse is not in the usual places either. Thomas Warton's
History of English Poetry
(17741781)the foundation of modern English literary historybegins at the close of the eleventh century, deliberately and self-consciously excluding Old English poetry: this verse, Warton
 
Page 2
argued, was different in kind from what followed. It did not provide a suitable infancy for the "rags to riches" story of English poetry that he was plotting.
Somehow people who study Old English poetry are still not deemed to be at the coal face, where the action is. E. D. Hirsch's list of "what literate Americans know" cites no Old English poem or poet, and never mentions the period (unless "Dark Ages" counts). Missing are
Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon
, Bede, Alfred, and the terms
Old English
and
Anglo-Saxon
(the list does include 1066, Norman Conquest, Battle of Hastings, King Arthur, and William the Conqueror).
Old English poetry, composed in a dead language and long unknown, unread, and untaught, exerted no influence on most of the names in the present volume. Nor does it obviously intrude on the concerns of the present. Tell a modern cultural historian that Old English poetry has something to say about alienation, and you get a shrug diluted by apathy.
For literary historians, the verse is an embarrassment, an enfant terrible resisting all attempts at interrogation. Not entirely oral in style, not entirely fixed in text, it remained strangely homogeneous and anonymous for at least twelve generations. To our ordinary modern questions about chronology, authorial styles, literary indebtedness, schools, genres, patronage, performance, transmission, theme and structure, even beginnings and ends, compositions of this sort give no intelligible or adequate answer. There is no agreement on the dates, absolute or relative, of the longer poems. Nor can we assume that the extant corpus of Old English poetry is representative of what once existed (just as we can never know the percentage of undiscovered murders). Confident statements about the "scop" or Anglo-Saxon oral poet are everywhere, enriching our lectures and enlivening our books: "[these] singers were honored and skilled performers for aristocratic patrons"; "the king's scop sat at the feet of the king"; "with a repertoire part memorized and part improvised, [the scop] accompanied his verses on the harp". But such descriptions are no more than hopeful speculations hallowed by repetition. King Alfred is the only known Anglo-Saxon to whom a quantity of Old English poetry is attributed.
No vernacular verse survives from the first Anglo-Saxon centuries, during which Roman Britannia was settled by Germanic speakers from the North Sea and Baltic littorals. Christianity and literacy reached the island in 597; the oldest Old English poetry extant, some thirty lines of
 
Page 3
manuscript verse, is roughly of the age of Bede (672/3735); seventeen lines occur in two runic inscriptions, probably of the eighth century. Between 800 and 1066 Anglo-Saxon England experienced Viking raids and settlements, the reigns of Alfred (871899) and his descendants down to Ethelred (9781016), then renewed Viking attacks, a Danish king on the English throne (10161042), and finally the Norman Conquest (1066). Datable verse from this period includes eight poems commemorating historical events of the tenth and eleventh centuries; the latest,
Durham
, a twenty-one-line eulogy of that city and its saints, was composed around 1104.
With the exception of ten short inscriptions on stone, whalebone, gold, and silver, Old English poetry has come down to us in manuscripts, about one hundred of them. The verse is set out continuously, like prose, with only occasional metrical or syntactical punctuation. In about half these manuscripts the only vernacular poetry is either
Bede's Death Song
(five lines in thirty-five manuscripts) or
Cædmon's Hymn
(nine lines in twenty-one manuscripts), inserted in two Latin works respectively about or by Bede. People were not necessarily thirty-five times fonder of Bede's poem than of
Beowulf
, which like most Old English verse survives in a single manuscript; but little has come down to us from Anglo-Saxon England that was not copied by clerical scribes or saved in a church library, where the celebrated monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow had an edge over the monster slayer.
The earliest evidence for the existence of books of vernacular poetry is an anecdote told in 893 about the childhood of Alfred (849-899) at the royal court: his mother promised a "book of English poetry" to whichever of her sons learned it quickest (naturally Alfred won). We are subsequently told that Alfred was a great memorizer of "English poems" and that his two children educated at home "learned the Psalms and books in English, and especially English poems." Two extant manuscripts containing a quantity of vernacular poetry have Alfredian associations: a Paris codex in a mid-eleventh-century hand preserves the first fifty Psalms rendered into Old English prose by Alfred, and the remaining one hundred in verse; and a codex from the mid-tenth century, now only a collection of charred leaves, included a complete translation of Boethius's
Consolation of Philosophy
into Old English prose and verse, the former certainly by Alfred, the latter probably. It is conceivable that poetry known to Alfred was copied a century and a half later into one or more of the four so-called poetic codices. These were
 
Page 4
written in the period 9751050 by a total of eight scribes and contain in all more than twenty thousand lines of Old English verse, the greater (in both senses of the word) part of the corpus.
Each of the four codices is a collection of works of different dates by different authors. In the contextless world of Old English poetry, these manuscripts are our chief evidence for how the poetry was read around the year 1000. The Junius manuscriptelaborately illustrated, imposing, and punctuated as if for recitationcontains scriptural poetry organized into two "books," the first based on Old Testament material, the second and shorter, on New. The Vercelli Book, copied in Canterbury toward the end of the tenth century and probably deposited in northern Italy by the end of the eleventh, preserves six poems interspersed in a collection of homiletic prose; far to the north, in present-day Scotland, a dozen lines from one of its poems,
The Dream of the Rood
, are carved on an eighth-century stone cross. The Exeter Book, a large and strictly poetic anthology, contains about 130 poems, moving from the great events of salvation history to a collection of sometimes obscene riddles. The last and least impressive in appearance of the codices preserves
Beowulf
and
Judith
, along with three prose works showing an interest, it has been argued, in the marvelous; the wonders described range from simple dragons and talking trees to huge, hirsute, polychromatic women fully accessorized with tusks, fangs, tails, and eleven feet apiece. A corpus of poetry "meagre in extent and eccentric in distribution" (this phrase taken from a description of Dark Age burials in England) must by its nature engender hypotheses and guesses rather than certainties.
The characteristic features of Old English poetry are hard to miss. John Milton found the style of
Brunanburh
, in comparison with the surrounding prose of the
Chronicle
, "over-chargd." At the turn of the eighteenth century, George Hickes described the relentless piling up of synonyms in the verse, the accumulation of weighty compounds, the loose appositions. At the turn of the nineteenth century Sharon Turner regretted the repetitiveness of Old English poetry, "the laboured metaphor, the endless periphrasis, the violent inversion, and the abrupt transition," warning readers against "confounding it with those delightful beauties which we now call poetry." At the beginning of this century, critics found it easy to believe that Old English verse was simpler, more innocent, less interesting to pry into than our own. "The audience for which the poet sang was different," wrote one scholar in 1907:
 
Page 5
"Would not our estimate be greatly changed if we could bring to these poems, as men did then, the interest and curiosity of children?" "It was a childish country," observes Richard Wilbur in his poem "Beowulf."
Certainly Old English poetry is composed in a highly patterned, formulaic style, studded with vagueness, and working in this manner and medium does eliminate a number of fine possibilities: "a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water" is out. But there are compensations: a single formulaic phrase, unremarkable, demanded by the meter, and exhausted by a chorus of previous poets, sometimes calls up a multitude of disparate and totally unexpected thoughts, the inferred unsaid, which in Old English poetry is often as important as the repeated just said.
Anglo-Saxon vernacular poets had a distinct lexicon at their disposal, a stock of about four hundred poetic words that never or very rarely occurred in prose (or, if they did, had a different meaning). These include many nouns for prince, man, woman, weapons, ships, battle, hall, mind, heart, and the likecommonplace things but expressed in charged language. Although the connotations of words within a single synonym group (e.g.,
ruler, distributor, guide, leader, protector
) may have differed, their denotations (prince, lord) are indistinguishable. The compounds so frequent in the poetry work in a similar way: a "mead-hall" quickly metamorphoses into a "wine-hall" or "ale-house"; the queen, like an absentminded hostess, hands out "mead-cups" at the royal "beer-party'' without raising eyebrows. Entire systems of interlocked compounds were constructed, all of which could be created and comprehended without reflection; they, like the poetic words, served a practical function, giving poets a wide choice of synonyms to satisfy alliterative requirements. The statistics recently drawn up for one late poem,
The Battle of Maldon
, are typical: out of a total of 535 lexical units (many occurring more than once), there are ninety-seven (18 percent) that never (or almost never, or not with the sense they have in the poem) occur in prose. Of these, forty-one are poetic words, and nine have a meaning they never have in prose. Forty-seven are compounds, of which only three also occur in prose. Of the sixteen compounds that are found only in
Maldon
, some (although we cannot tell which) may have been coined for the occasion.
The language of Old English verse was not particularizing like that of modern poetry, which cheerfully takes as its own the lexicon of finance, botany, or ornithology; nor is there any of that striving for

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