1
Poet and Poesy
Axiom: all peoples at all times have had poetry and song. It follows that the
Indo-Europeans must have had them, and that a continuous tradition linked
their poetry and song with those of the historical successor peoples.
Thisa priori conclusion is in itself empty. We shall endeavour to give it
substance by comparison of the documented poetic traditions. We are inter-
ested, not just in establishing that the Indo-Europeans had poetry, but in
finding out, so far as may be possible, what kinds of poetry they had, what
were its characteristics, and how they conceptualized it.
What do we mean by poetry? The term will cover all verse, that is, all
composition constrained within some kind of metrical form. But for the
present purpose a wider definition is called for. Much of the evidence for
Indo-European poetry comes from the identification of what appears to be
‘poetic’ diction. When we characterize it as poetic, the implied antithesis
is not with prose but with ‘normal’ or everyday speech. Prose (prosa oratio) is
not a meaningful category where there is no written literature. The oppos-
ition is between ‘unmarked’ and ‘marked’ language: on the one hand, ordin-
ary, idiomatic speech; on the other, a style which diverges from the ordinary
by using elevated or archaic vocabulary, ornamental epithets, figures of
speech, a contrived word order, or other artificial features. It is this ‘marked’
language that it will be convenient to call poetic. But its use may not have
been confined to compositions in verse. There is some likelihood that it was
also deployed for high-flown narrative or rhetorical utterances that lacked
metrical form.^1
(^1) Cf. Meid (1978), 11: ‘ “Dichtung” ist im Grunde genommen jede über das bloß
Umgangssprachliche hinausgehende stilisierte Rede, jeder in irgendeiner Absicht sprach-
künstlerisch gestaltete Stoff; die Formung mußte nicht unbedingt eine metrische sein.’