Reworking ancient epic, myth and tragedy has been a concern of Twenty First century writers no less than previous generations. If anything, the modern era seems to be witnessing an expansion of genres and forms considered suitable for writing about the classical world – in particular the fraught but inspired Brand New Ancients of rapper-rhapsode Kate Tempest.
Performance is no less important to Devon-based poet Alice Oswald, as exemplified by the recent work Tithonus, her own take on the myth about how the goddess of the Dawn fell in love with a mortal man, kidnapped him, and asked Zeus to grant him immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Oswald’s poem was designed to be performed in real time to musical accompaniment in the exact length that the summer sun takes to rise, as recorded by Oswald in her field-work research for the poem. It’s a seemingly difficult premise, but one pulled off with incredible poetic dexterity.
I first became aware of the importance of the performance element in the work of Alice Oswald – a former student at New College – in a fairly stressful situation about two years ago. Having mentioned her in my personal statement, the tutor interviewing me informed me in a closing conversation that she had recently performed her Iliad-inspired work Memorial in Oxford, reciting it purely from memory. In retrospect, (I think I was too anxious to make much of it at the time) this seems like a serious commitment to recreating the circumstances of the kind of oral and extemporaneous composition that heavily influenced the Iliad. It is this faithfulness to her poetry’s sources, whether ancient epic or contemporary interviews, which makes her stand out among modern poets.
Critics often contrast the magnificent plots and vivid characters that drive Homer’s sweeping epic with Oswald’s emphasis on the experiences of individual soldiers in Memorial. This is satisfying to note, as it demonstrates just how successful she has been in rescuing the Iliad from becoming a “public school poem… a clicheÌd, British Empire part of our culture”.
This does, however, do Homer some injustice. He was an innovator in the innately conservative tradition of oral epics, handing crowd-pleasing poems and elevating sections of them into some of the finest and most influential literature ever written. He does not achieve this by glamorising and dramatising the emotional dilemmas of a few main heroes to the detriment of other soldiers. Instead, he rescues the patronymics and epithets that would have made up vast lists of the dead from meaninglessness through ingenious narrative detail, through the creative possibilities presented by fathers and sons, armour and gifts, and their ability to suggest a story worthy of epic behind the fate of every soldier.
Oswald, too, achieves something in this tradition, bringing similes and epithets to life in a way that haunts my every reading of the Iliad. The typical “long-shadowed spear” of the Homeric warrior becomes, from the perspective of the victim counting down to his death, “a sundial moving over his last moments”. The murmurs rippling through crowds that are described as being like wind over the sea or through the cornfields, and are used by Oswald to conjure up the desperation and disappointment of grief. “When the west wind runs through a field/Wishing and Searching/Nothing to be found/The corn stalks shake their green heads.”
She is particularly adept at writing about nature, a skill influenced by close observation of the natural world during her training as a gardener, and her chosen subjects put this familiarity to excellent use. Her poem Dart was made partly using interviews with riverside workers and inhabitants, making it a richly coloured, abstract tapestry of nature and history, told through the diverse voices of the river’s people and creatures. The moments of pure description interwoven throughout this poem are made incomparably beautiful by the background texture, becoming, among various accounts clamouring to be heard, moments of reflective quiet in which the effect of each word can be appreciated on its own. “A/Lark/ Spinning/Around/A/Single/Note/Splitting/And/ Mending/It.”
It is no exaggeration to say that the river Dart itself is the central character, in keeping with her determination to inhabit the mindset of her chosen subject with maximum closeness and accuracy, whether a river, the dawn, or a long dead soldier – a remarkably ambitious mission statement for an exercis in empathy, and all the more remarkable for her success in doing so. She has absorbed the spirit of equality in Homer’s work, recognising the importance of each tale being given a space for its telling.
Oswald is frequently cited as Ted Hughes’ natural poetic successor, but there are times when I think that her work invites comparison with far longer-lived literature, particularly ancient writers such as Homer and Virgil. She is equally comfortable and evocative in the close-up details of private lives as in the expression of sweepingly universal plights. More importantly, she also permits a plurality of voices in her work without making it seem chaotic, letting everything speak for itself rather than attempting to control, confine, or concretely define experiences.
Alice Oswald will be reciting from a selection of her work at Keble College on February 13th.
