Why did poets continue to call themselves singers,
and their poems songs, long after the formal link
between poetry and music had been severed? Daniel Karlin
explores the origin and meaning of the 'figure of the
singer', tracing its roots in classical mythology and in
the Bible, and following its rise from the 'adventurous
song' of Milton's Paradise Lost to its
apotheosis in the nineteenth century-by which time it
had also become an oppressive cliché. Poets might
embrace, or resist, this dominant figure of their art,
but could not ignore it. Shadowing the metaphor is
another figure, that of the literal singer, a source of
fascination, and rivalry, to poets who are confined to
words on the page.
The book opens with an
emblematic figure of the greatest of all 'singers':
Homer, playing his lyre, at the centre of the frieze of
poets on the Albert Memorial in London. Chapters on the
tragicomic rise and fall of 'the bard', on the link
between female song and suffering, and on the metaphor
of poetry as birdsong, are followed by detailed readings
of poems by Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Hardy. The final
chapter, on the songs of Bob Dylan, suggests that
recording technology has given fresh impetus to the
quarrel (which is also a love-affair) between poetic
language and song.
The Figure of the
Singer offers a profound and stimulating analysis
of the idea of poetry as song and of the complex,
troubled relations between voice and text
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