When Words Sing - The Evolution of Poetry from Chant to Screen
When Words
Sing
The
Evolution of Poetry from Chant to Screen
By Dr Kieran Beville
“Poetry is language at its most distilled
and most powerful.”
(Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate)
|
|
There was a young fella named Rollocks
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks
As he walked on the Strand
With a girl, by the hand
The water came up to his ... ankles
"That" declared Behan "is prose.
But if the tide had been in, it would have been poetry."
What separates poetry from prose? Is it the music of the words, the
deliberate form, the brevity — or something deeper and more elusive? Across
centuries, poetry has been everything from sacred chant to protest slogan, from
handwritten sonnets to viral Instagram posts. Yet it always seems to ask the
same question: how do we make language not just say, but sing?
Today, with poetry posted in digital feeds as often as it’s spoken on festival stages, some wonder: have we traded depth and formality for immediacy? Or has poetry’s widening embrace made it stronger, braver, and more alive than ever before?
Before
Writing: Poetry as Living Memory
Long
before poems were written, they were performed. In cultures worldwide,
rhythm and repetition were tools of survival: a way to remember lineage, law,
and legend before paper or ink existed.
The world’s oldest surviving
poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates to ancient Mesopotamia around 2100
BCE. But scholars believe it began as spoken storytelling, shaped by
generations of voices. In ancient India, the Rigveda’s sacred hymns were
memorised and passed down with astonishing precision. In ancient Greece, bards
like Homer turned tales of gods and warriors into sprawling epics like The
Iliad and The Odyssey. In those early poems, the boundary between
poetry and prose was clear: poetry demanded to be heard, remembered, and
repeated.
I believe that poetry was born in the moment someone needed to remember, to praise, or to mourn and found that ordinary speech was not enough. Even after writing emerged, poetry stayed close to the human voice. In China, the Book of Songs (11th–7th centuries BCE) gathered folk lyrics and ritual chants. Across Africa, griots performed dynastic histories in verse, accompanied by drums or the kora (a 21-stringed harp).
Griots
Griots
are traditional oral historians, poets, storytellers, praise singers, and
musicians in many West African cultures—especially among the Mandé, Wolof, Fulani,
and other ethnic groups.
Historically,
griots have played an essential role in preserving and transmitting the
history, genealogies, myths, and cultural values of their communities. They
often serve as living archives, reciting the ancestral stories, heroic deeds,
and moral lessons that form a people’s collective memory. Beyond history,
griots are also entertainers and advisors, performing songs with instruments
like the kora (a 21-stringed harp), balafon (a type of wooden xylophone), or
ngoni (a stringed lute).
The griot
tradition is typically hereditary, passed down through family lines, where
younger generations apprentice under older masters. Even today, griots continue
to perform at weddings, naming ceremonies, and other important social
gatherings, bridging the past and present through the art of storytelling and
music.
In essence, griots are the keepers of memory and the voice of the community, blending history, music, poetry, and performance into a living, breathing cultural legacy.
Medieval
Courts, Sacred Verses, and Craft
By the
Middle Ages, poetry had become an art or craft as well as memory. In Europe, troubadours
and trouvères entertained noble courts with intricate songs of love and
chivalry. Poets experimented with complex forms like the villanelle[1],
rondeau[2],
and sestina[3],
each turning language into a kind of puzzle.
Meanwhile,
sacred poetry flourished: Old Testament psalms, Latin hymns in monasteries, the
mystical verse of Hildegard of Bingen, and epic Christian poems like Beowulf
(composed in Old English around the 8th–11th centuries). In the Islamic world,
Persian poets such as Rumi and Hafez wrote ghazals — a form
defined by its repeating end words and themes of divine and human love.
Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Every culture’s poetry shared a similar impulse: compress experience into form and sound, transforming language into something more memorable than prose.
The
Renaissance: The Sonnet and Beyond
During
the European Renaissance, poetry rediscovered classical Greek and Roman
influences and developed new forms, most famously the sonnet. In Italy, Francesco
Petrarca — known as Petrarch — refined the sonnet’s 14-line
structure to capture longing and philosophical reflection.
The
Petrarchan sonnet (also called the Italian sonnet) has a distinct two-part
structure. It consists of 14 lines total, divided into an octave (the first 8
lines) and a sestet (the final 6 lines). Rhyme scheme: the octave typically
follows ABBAABBA. The sestet can vary, but common patterns include CDECDE,
CDCDCD, or CDEDCE. The Volta is the ‘turn’. Between the octave and sestet,
there’s usually a volta — a rhetorical ‘turn’ or shift in thought, argument, or
mood. The octave often presents a situation, problem, or emotional tension. The
sestet responds with a resolution, reflection, or counterpoint. This clear
division gives the Petrarchan sonnet its elegant balance between conflict and
resolution.
English
poets adapted it. William Shakespeare used the sonnet form (three
quatrains and a couplet) to explore love, betrayal, and mortality, as in, “Shall
I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets remain
cornerstones of English literature.
Poets
like John Milton wrote epics in blank verse[4]
(Paradise Lost), while metaphysical poets such as John Donne
combined emotional intensity with startling metaphors, bridging sacred and
secular love.
Through all, poetry was defined by its pattern, whether strict or newly invented. Prose explained; poetry heightened and transformed. There is, however, plenty of scope to quibble with this statement, indeed with any statement that attempts to DEFINE poetry. One great statement that I come back to time and time again is by Michael Roberts (poet and editor of the Faber Book of Modern verse, who said in the Introduction to that collection that, “ poetry is primarily an exploration of the possibilities of language” – helpful but not definitive.
Romanticism:
The Heart at the Centre
By the
late 18th century, the Romantic poets shifted poetry’s centre of gravity: less
on external form, more on internal feeling. William Wordsworth, in his Preface
to Lyrical Ballads (1800), famously wrote, “Poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity.” Wordsworth’s
poems found the sublime not in kings or gods but in nature and common life.
His
contemporaries — Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats —
each celebrated nature, imagination, and personal emotion. Poetry became more
conversational, yet retained rhythm and vivid imagery.
At the
same time, Emily Dickinson in 19th-century America wrote over 1,700
brief, startling poems, many unpublished in her lifetime. She described the
physical impact of true poetry, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head
were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Interesting, but it could be a hangover
after a night out with too many tequila shots!
Emily Dickinson’s compressed,
elliptical verse profoundly influenced modern poetry. Romantics redefined
poetry not just by what it said, but by how it made us feel.
Modernism:
Fracture and Experiment
The 20th
century brought world wars, scientific revolutions, and new art movements and
poetry responded with radical experimentation. T.S. Eliot, born in
America but later a British citizen, shattered narrative unity in The Waste
Land (1922), layering voices and allusions to create a collage of modern
disillusionment. His call to “make it new” was echoed by contemporaries like Ezra
Pound. Poets abandoned predictable rhyme and metre. William Carlos
Williams insisted, “no ideas but in things,” … capturing moments in crisp,
image-driven free verse.
In the
U.S., the Harlem Renaissance brought African American voices to
prominence. Langston Hughes blended jazz rhythms, speech, and social
commentary.
Later, Confessional
poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell turned inward,
exposing mental illness and family trauma with stark honesty.
Meanwhile,
the Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg, rebelled against post-war
conformity, writing in sprawling, free-flowing lines.
Yet across all these movements, poetry remained distinct: a heightened language, carefully crafted or intentionally fractured, seeking new ways to express the modern condition.
Poetry
Today: Spoken, Typed, and Streamed
Today,
poetry lives everywhere: on page, stage, and screen. Spoken word and slam
poetry return verse to performance and communal engagement, echoing
poetry’s ancient oral roots. On social media, poets like Rupi Kaur post
minimalist, lowercase verses paired with simple line drawings, reaching
millions. Critics debate whether this new brevity dilutes complexity, but it
undeniably expands poetry’s audience.
Contemporary
poets explore identity, politics, environment, and memory. Joy Harjo,
the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, weaves indigenous history and
jazz influences. Ocean Vuong, born in Vietnam and raised in the U.S.,
writes poems that blur prose and verse, exploring language, loss, and love. “Poetry
is language at its most distilled and most powerful” says Rita Dove whose work often highlights
African American history and women’s voices.
In every form — from haiku on Twitter to multi-part epics — poetry remains an art of distillation and resonance.
Prose
poetry
Prose poetry lives in the restless territory between story and song, where the rules of grammar still hold sway but the spirit of verse seeps through every sentence. It wears the shape of a paragraph, yet it beats with a poet’s heart: vivid images, charged silences, and rhythms that echo long after the last word. In this form, meaning often arrives not through narrative clarity, but through surprise—unexpected metaphors, abrupt shifts in tone, or a single haunting phrase that opens a hidden door. Prose poetry rejects the tyranny of line breaks (who knew they were tyrannical) without discarding the mystery of poetry itself. It is at once grounded and airborne – A hybrid that dares to suggest that language’s raw power isn’t bound by form, but set free by it.
Have We
Lost Something, or Gained?
Some might lament the decline of shared forms: few memorise entire sonnets; formal metre and rhyme feel rare. Poetry once unified a cultural moment; now it splinters into countless niches. But others argue that this very pluralism is poetry’s strength: more voices, more subjects, more forms. Where poetry was once the domain of the educated elite, it’s now open to anyone. As many celebrate this egalitarianism the question arises – is there any skill in poetry now – where is the craft and art borne out of years of painstaking study and effort? Some might suggest it’s like fame. Today one does not have to actually achieve anything to be famous whereas in the past one had to be the first to climb Mount Everest or to win an Olympic Gold medal etc. Now, I got that off my chest! But what unites what unites isn’t the shape of the lines, but the transformation of language into something felt. Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” His plainspoken style concealed deep complexity.
So, What
Is Poetry, Really?
Across time, certain traits persist:
- Condensation: choosing words so
carefully that every syllable matters.
- Musicality: rhythm, rhyme, or sound
patterns that make language memorable.
- Metaphor and imagery:
saying something beyond the literal.
- Form: whether free verse or
sonnet, the shape guides breath and thought.
Prose tells us; poetry shows, suggests, and feels. One might contest these statements…feel free, a discussion about it might make an interesting workshop.
The Art
That Endures
From
ancient fireside chants to phone screens, poetry has adapted without losing its
essence. We may have fewer shared metres, but we have more shared voices. Poetry
still turns language into something more than information: it becomes memory,
music, and moment. And whether it’s whispered, written, performed, or posted,
it remains what Seamus Heaney famously said that poetry should “catch the heart
off guard and blow it open.” This quote beautifully captures Heaney’s belief
that poetry isn’t just about craft or intellect: it’s about emotional
revelation. A good poem, in his view, has the power to surprise us into feeling
something unexpected and profound—to break through our defences and awaken deeper
understanding or empathy. It’s a reminder that, at its best, poetry is not
merely an exercise in language but an experience that shakes us, changes us,
and opens the heart.
About
the Author
Dr Kieran Beville is an Irish poet, author
and former educator whose career spans literature, philosophical theology, and
intercultural engagement. A former teacher of English and History, he was also
a tutor at University College Cork, Ireland in the 1980s and later a professor
in the Intercultural Studies Department at Tyndale Theological Seminary,
Amsterdam (a constituent college of the Free University), where he taught
Hermeneutics and Postmodernism. His teaching and leadership training work has
brought him to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India, fostering dialogue
across cultural and ideological divides. Beville is the author of twenty-five
books across genres – from creative writing guides and biographies to poetry
and works on faith and culture – published in Ireland, the UK, USA and India.
He has seven collections of poetry and many of these poems have also appeared
in literary journals and anthologies worldwide. A regular newspaper columnist
and feature writer, Beville’s work often spotlights local artists, musicians
and writers, reflecting his commitment to cultural heritage and human stories.
Formerly a Baptist pastor and author of numerous theological books and
articles, he left the evangelical community in 2017 and embraced his voice as a
secular poet and writer. Through decades of writing, teaching and travel, Dr Beville
has borne witness to the human condition across continents and communities,
bringing a perspective shaped by faith, doubt, history and art.
[1] A villanelle is a nineteen-line
poetic form consisting of five tercets (three-line stanzas) followed by a
concluding quatrain (four-line stanza). It is characterized by two repeating
rhymes and two refrains: the first and third lines of the opening stanza are
alternately repeated as the final lines of the subsequent stanzas and then come
together as the closing couplet in the quatrain. The structure and repetition
give the villanelle a musical, almost hypnotic quality, making it especially
suited to themes of obsession, longing, or reflection. One of the most famous
examples is Dylan Thomas’s "Do not go gentle into that good night."
[2] A rondeau is a fixed French
poetic form typically made up of 13 or sometimes 15 lines, divided into three
stanzas (usually quintet, quatrain, and sestet). It features only two rhymes
throughout and includes a short refrain (often the opening words or phrase)
that appears at the end of the second and third stanzas.
The refrain and tight rhyme scheme give the rondeau
its distinctive, song-like, circular feel—hence the name, which comes from the
French word for “round.”
[3] A sestina is a complex poetic
form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-line
final stanza called an envoi. Instead of rhyming, it uses a strict pattern of
repeating the same six end-words in a specific, rotating order across the
stanzas. This repetition creates an intricate, echoing effect, making the
sestina especially suited to exploring themes of obsession, memory, or circular
thought.
[4]
Blank verse is unrhymed
poetry written in a consistent meter (10 syllables per line), most commonly
iambic pentameter. It maintains a rhythmic structure—typically five pairs of
unstressed and stressed syllables per line—while forgoing end rhymes. Widely
used in English dramatic and narrative poetry, blank verse offers a balance
between natural speech and formal rhythm, allowing poets to craft lines that
sound both elevated and conversational.
Comments
Post a Comment