Volume V (2022)
The Ontological Status of
Modern Poetry
Jesse Ferraioli Dartmouth College
Abstract
Poetry has a long- standing oral tradition in the Western canon. Heroic epics like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were passed down through generations, diverging further and further from the original with each iteration, until versions were written down and became the fixed texts that are widely read today. Declamation-based poetry, as the oral tradition is called, still flourishes in contemporary times, but in the Western world of poetry, inscription-based poetry — i.e. written poetry — has largely replaced the oral tradition. Unlike the Western literary canon, which has begun as an inscription-based practice and continues to exist as one, we cannot discount the significance of poetry’s distinctive declamation -based origins. Drawing from the recent work of Anna Christina Ribeiro in which she describes the transition from declamation-based poetry to inscription-based poetry, this paper will assess the implications of this transition on the ontological status of modern poetry as we understand it, and why poetry deserves a status that is ontologically distinct from modern literature. Firstly, this paper will establish some identity conditions of literature to articulate why modern poetry must have distinct identity conditions in the first place. Secondly, I will attempt to answer some ontological questions arising from Ribeiro’s proposal and introduce some important implications for equating modern poetry with inscription-based poetry.
Introduction What is the ontological status of modern poetry and how is it ontologically distinct from
literature? The ontological status of poetry is ever-evolving, developing from a centuries-old
oral tradition into today’s inscription -based, modern poetic tradition. 1 With the invention of the
printing press, oral tradition (or declamation-based poetry) began to slowly fade away as
versions of oral poems were transcribed onto paper, preserved in their status. Anna Christina
1 When I discuss modern poetry, I am specifically talking about Western modern poetry. Declamation-based poetry persists in many non-Western and indigenous communities, which I am not attempting to generalize as part of this discussion.
34
Made with FlippingBook Annual report maker