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Poetry — Popular Entertainment?

ON LITERATURE — by G.L. Horton

KQK... writes: It was? In an age with even fewer readers than today? What was the literacy rate in 1638 compared with today?

What's with this literacy fixation? Poems are supposed to be recited from memory, and they were recited, and the popular ones remembered and the ones that didn't inspire popularity forgotten, long before anyone thought to write them down.

In my grandparents' day as in Shakespeare's, one of the ways ordinary people entertained themselves and their neighbors was to recite speeches and poems and sing songs. Grandma had a whole repertoire of memorized poems, and although she was shy and didn't recite them in company, she taught them to me. Yes, plenty of them were bad; and the majority were humorous rather than serious.

People don't "do" poems for home entertainment any more. But they do still gather and play piano or guitar and sing. (I do whenever I get a chance-- at least once a week) What proportion of the songs sung in living rooms or around campfires do you think are learned by ear, as opposed to being learned from sheet music? My guess is about 9 out of 10. (02/21/02)

 

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