Oral Poetry

“It is found all over the world, past and present, from the meditative personal poetry of recent Eskimo or Maori poets, to mediaeval European and Chinese ballads, or the orally composed epics of pre-classical Greek in the first millenium B.C.” ~Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 1977

Oral poetry, or oral formulaic poetry, is composed and transmitted by singers or reciters. In old times recitation was often accompanied by a harp, drum or other musical instrument.

Pre-historical origin: It has been present since time immemorial and yet it continues to flourish even now among illiterate populations.

Oral poetry includes both

• Narrative Forms (Epics, Ballads)
• Lyric Forms (Folk songs)

There’s no fixed version of an oral composition, since its execution varies from person to person and performance to performance. Such poems incorporate verbal formulas (set words, word patterns, refrains, set-pieces of description) which help a performer to improvise a narrative or a song on a given theme, and also to recall and repeat, although often with variations and differences, a poem that has been passed down from elders and ancestors.

Forms- Complex and variegated (many styles)

• Epics  (sung, multi-episodic–long–poetry; Homer, Africa, Turkey, etc.)
• Ballads   (sung narrative poem with a single episode)
• Panegyric Odes (to praise rulers and heros; Africa, Oceania)
• Lyric Poetry (relatively short, non-narrative, sung poem – most of our songs, psalms, hymns, etc.)
• Various others (lengthy religious verse, plays, prayers, curses, street-cries, rhymes, etc.)

Oral ballads and songs have been collected and published ever since the 18th century.

Systematic analysis of Oral Poetry began only in 1930s by the American scholar Milman Perry on field trips to Yugoslavia, last part in Europe where the custom of composing and transmitting oral poetry still survives.

Albert B. Lord continued this approach and applied the principles of this contemporary oral poetry retrospectively to an analysis of the constitution of the Homeric epics, Anglo Saxon’s Beowulf, Old French Chanson de Roland. 

Research into oral literary performances is being carried on in Africa, Asia and other parts of the world where this ancient tradition maintain its vitality.

Current modes of oral poetry

• Limericks
• Rap Poetry
• Poetry Slams

FEATURES OF ORAL POETRY

• Rhythm (culturally defined)
• Stylistic and formal attributes (Heightened language, metaphorical expression, musical form or accompaniment, structural repetitiveness, prosodic features -meter, alliteration-, parallelism)

• Manner and mood set apart from everyday speech( Done by: context or setting, mode of delivery, audience’s action, musical attributes, style, and atmosphere of play rather than reality (set apart from real life), interactive )

•  Performance event (text alone does not equal a poem)

-Ephemeral (depends on personality and skill of performer, feeling of the event, mood of audience, etc.)

-More flexible and dependent on social context (not just about a text)

-Still rendered as a text (but calls for attention to context)