Collection

Alliterative Verse / Avant-Garde

A conversation among Old English, Middle English, and contemporary poems

BY Eric Weiskott

A tenth-century codex printed on aged pages lies open on a tile floor.
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The Exeter Book, or Codex Exoniensis, is a 10th century book that anthologizes Anglo-Saxon poetry, displayed in this photo at Exeter Cathedral, Devon in 1968.

A jeweled brooch in the shape of a disc with intricate, curling metalwork.
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An Anglo-Saxon jeweled disc brooch from the 7th century CE. The disc is 6.3 cm in diameter and is comprised of domed shell elements with garnets, two of which are preserved, and cloisonne circles.

A pile of silver Anglo-Saxon coins alongside one modern-day one pence coin on a red background.
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A modern-day one pence coin is displayed at the British Museum to contrast a pile of Anglo-Saxon silver pennies from a coin hoard containing around 5,200 items. The hoard was discovered in Lenborough, England in December of 2014.

Closely-cropped view of pages from a tenth-century codex.
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Pages from the 10th century Exeter Book, or Codex Exoniensis, displayed in this photo at Exeter Cathedral, Devon in 1968.

Called Lud’s Church, this natural cleft in the rock hidden in the Black Forest was a place of worship in the 15th century for followers of John Wycliffe.
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Called Lud’s Church, this natural cleft in the rock hidden in the Black Forest was a place of worship for followers of John Wycliffe in the 15th century.

Manuscript from “Vision of Piers Plowman”.jpg
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A page from a manuscript of Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland.

Bright gold metalwork artifacts lay in gloved hands held out to display the items.
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Treasures from the Staffordshire Hoard, the UK’s largest collection of Anglo-Saxon treasure discovered to date, displayed at Birmingham Museum in 2009. The hoard includes over 1,500 gold and silver artifacts found by metal detector enthusiast named Terry Herbert.

This collection of poetry, curated by Eric Weiskott, surveys Old and Middle English poetry by comparison to contemporary poems that explore similar sounds and formal techniques. In his introduction, Weiskott writes,

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. [...] 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.

Introduction
Poise: Lines/half-lines
Medieval and contemporary, poetic lines find their equilibrium in the balance between two halves, or two ideas, or two possible interpretations.
“dear Poet”: Subjectivity And Song
Who is speaking when the poem speaks? What comes first, the poem or the self?
Death And Beauty: Lyricism/finitude
The genealogy of lyric poetry in English stretches all the way back to the age of Bede. As compact and often enigmatic compositions, lyric poems have a special purchase on the twin problems of death and beauty.
“what If?”
Poetry is a machine for imagining the world otherwise. These poems ask a simple but profound question.
“a Modern Letter Sent From Antiquity”: Time-warps
Poets look to the past for inspiration. The poets in this section flex their historical imagination.
Swords And Viscera: Battle, Encounter, Race
These are poems with body counts; their grotesque fascination with disembowelment corresponds to how they consider the social meaning of human difference.
Say What I Am Called: Riddle, Charm, Prophecy
If a poem baffles you, maybe that was the idea! These poems are keeping something from you.
Lions, Dragons, And Werewolves: Romance
The most popular and widely disseminated literary genre before the novel, and one of the inspirations for the novel, was romance. Medieval European culture articulated an enduring connection between powerful and fantastical creatures and romantic love.