THE FIRST POETRY

Poetry is an ancient art, with its origins well before those of recorded history (about 3000 BC). The oldest surviving remnants come from the Near East, dating as far back as 2600 BC. The Assyro-Babylonian, Sumerian, and Egyptian cultures all contributed to this fascinating and fragmentary store of work. The remnants are preserved in cuneiform, an ancient wedge-shaped writing on clay tablets, or on papyrus paper stenciled with hieroglyphs, characters used in picture writing. These early poems included praises of gods and heroes, chants (songs that repeat the same note or words), wisdom literature (lists of advice and truths from elders or other authorities), magic charms, and laments to mourn or inspire pity. All these poems were for the most part religious in nature. One of the chief structural characteristics was the use of recurrent phrases or refrains:

Your spirit–do I not know how to please it?
Bridegroom, sleep in our house till dawn.
Your heart–do I not know how to warm it?
Lion, sleep in our house till dawn.

(Sumerian, about 2000 BC; trans. Jane Hirshfield, 1994)




Evidence suggests that much early poetry was intended to be sung, at times with musical accompaniment. Longer works existed as well. With its earliest portions dating as far back as 1200 BC, the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, stands as one of the world's oldest and most influential poetic works. The even older Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (about 2000 BC), contains an account of a flood strikingly similar to that of Genesis in the Bible. The oldest poem attributed to a specific author is the “Hymn to Inanna” (about 2300 BC) by Enheduanna, a high priestess and daughter of Sumerian king Sargon I. Here she describes the destructive-creative fury of the fertility goddess Inanna in protecting her worshipers:

Like a dragon,
you poisoned the land–
When you roared at the earth
In your thunder,
Nothing green could live.
A flood fell from the mountain:
You, Inanna,
Foremost in Heaven and Earth.
Lady riding a beast,
You rained fire on the heads of men. 

These traces suggest the presence of a widespread oral poetry tradition aimed at providing pleasure and offering prayer, as well as fulfilling the important social function of commemorating lives, battles, and historical events. Within the warrior culture that helped shape much early Greek poetry, this final purpose was particularly crucial. In a preliterate world lacking many means of remembering a person’s story after death, oral poetry took on great importance as a vehicle for awarding a kind of earthly immortality. Once passed into the “fame” of words, the hero would live forever in the minds of listeners. Poetry gained power and authority in part because it was felt to be divinely inspired. In the Greek epic tradition, exclusive to male poets as far as we know, the singer called upon the muse, a goddess, to fill him with voice as in the opening of Homer’s Iliad:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes . . .

(The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore)



This summoning of the muse, known as invocation, implied the existence of an imaginative force outside the poet's own mind and body. In the ancient past it was believed that inspiration—a Greek word meaning literally the “taking in of breath”—was conferred through the generosity of divine beings, linking earthly humans and their brief lives to the eternal spirit of the gods. An important change in this idea of inspiration would come centuries later. With 17th-century metaphysical poets, the center of inspiration moved inward to the soul; still later, with 19th-century romantic poets, to the unconscious mind and the imagination.

Scholarly opinion has changed greatly regarding the composition of the Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. For centuries, it was assumed that a poet named Homer composed the epics, memorized them, and repeated them word for word at public festivals and celebrations. In the 20th century, researchers have argued that although a poet by that name may have existed, he was simply the last—and possibly the best—in a series of oral poets giving voice to what was already a traditional story. From 1933 to 1935, classical scholars Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord observed performances by oral epic poets in Yugoslavia, noting that the poets varied their delivery each time. Rather than simply reciting the poem from memory, they embroidered and varied the poem with each repetition, making use of standard passages and phrases to describe certain characters. Scholars speculate that this oral practice may explain Homer’s repeated lines and sections as well as phrases such as ““the wine-dark sea,”” “swift-footed Achilles,” and “grey-eyed Athena.”