Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry

Literary critic Ruby (The Zero and the One) delivers a dazzling and ambitious “verse essay” tracing the history of poetry from Homer through the present. He begins with early Greek poetry performances, where audiences didn’t seek to interpret the poet’s words so much as “judge the skill with which they are sung.” In medieval times, poetry was usually composed by court troubadours and performed by jongleurs (itinerant entertainers), Ruby explains, discussing how troubadours developed increasingly complicated rhyme schemes to make it difficult for “unscrupulous” jongleurs to introduce their own changes. Elsewhere, Ruby describes how poets attempted more sophisticated literary techniques after the 15th-century invention of the printing press, which enabled readers to spend more time parsing texts; how modernists wrote thematically dense verse in hopes of inspiring enough scholarly exegesis to keep their names alive after their deaths; and how a contemporary overabundance of poets makes it appear that most poems are read by few and culturally irrelevant. Ruby’s effortless synthesis of artistic, cultural, and technological developments makes him an excellent historical guide, and the verse essay format—consciously modeled on the argumentative poetry of Parmenides and Alexander Pope, among others—proves a novel reading experience. This literary history stands in a class all its own. (Nov.)