Poetry can change the world

http://bostonreview.net/poetry-arts-culture/poetry-changed-world-elaine-scarry

Extract:

“Medieval poems helped to give rise to new civic institutions.

The Iliad is an epic ignited by the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon, and we are more likely to associate dispute with epic poetry or with plays, as in the drama contests of fifth-century Greece. But many other genres of poetry have the debate structure built into them, as we can see by the word “anthem”—derived from “antiphone” or “verse response”—which surfaces in the translations. That an anthem, or hymn of praise, holds disputing voice within it reminds us that there is nothing anti-lyric about this deliberative structure.

Many styles of poetry bring us face to face with acts of deliberation. The eclogue is a dialogue poem about the act of choosing, as in Virgil’s Third and Seventh Eclogues when a judge is asked to choose between the arguments of two shepherds. The word “eclogue” is derived from eklegein, meaning, “to choose.”¹¹ Another example is the tenzone, in which two poets argue “in alternating couplets,” as Urban Holmes describes in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.¹² The tenzone eventually took on other forms, such as the partimen or jeu parti, in which one “poet proposes two hypothetical situations.” One of the positions is then defended by that poet and the other by a second poet, each speaking in three stanzas.¹³ And in his translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova, Mark Musa explains, “The Italian troubadours invented the sonnet form [of the tenzone], still a mode of debate in which the problem is set forth in a proposta inviting a risposta (using the same rhymes) from another poet.”¹⁴

While in the tenzone two distinct sonnets are placed in dispute, an oppositional mental act is also interior to the sonnet itself, particularly in the Petrarchan form with its division into an octave and a sestet. While the volta, or “turn of thought,” is most emphatic in the Petrarchan form, it is also recognizable in Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets¹⁵