"No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded"
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Abercrombie is quietly picking a fight with the page. For a poet, that sounds almost heretical, until you remember the moment he’s speaking from: early 20th-century Britain, when poetry was being pulled in two directions at once. On one side, print culture is exploding - cheap books, mass literacy, the poem as a private object. On the other, modernity is remaking sound itself: public lectures, the gramophone, radio on the horizon. Against that backdrop, his claim isn’t nostalgia; it’s a theory of where poetry actually lives.
The line works because it refuses the common assumption that writing is the poem and speech is merely a delivery system. Abercrombie flips it: the written word is a compromise, a set of stage directions for the real event. Subtextually, he’s defending the body - breath, pace, hesitation, emphasis - as meaning-making tools, not decorative extras. The “substitute” phrasing is pointed: print can preserve, circulate, and canonize, but it can’t replicate the social contract of being heard, or the way sound forces language to unfold in time. You can skim a page; you can’t skim a voice without breaking it.
There’s also a canny assertion of craft and authority. If poetry is founded on speech, then the poet isn’t just a maker of texts but a designer of experience, accountable to the ear. Abercrombie’s intent reads like a corrective to the bookish habit of treating poems as puzzles for silent decoding. He’s insisting that poetry is closer to music and rhetoric than to literature-as-archive, and that the reader who never hears the poem is missing the art it was built on.
The line works because it refuses the common assumption that writing is the poem and speech is merely a delivery system. Abercrombie flips it: the written word is a compromise, a set of stage directions for the real event. Subtextually, he’s defending the body - breath, pace, hesitation, emphasis - as meaning-making tools, not decorative extras. The “substitute” phrasing is pointed: print can preserve, circulate, and canonize, but it can’t replicate the social contract of being heard, or the way sound forces language to unfold in time. You can skim a page; you can’t skim a voice without breaking it.
There’s also a canny assertion of craft and authority. If poetry is founded on speech, then the poet isn’t just a maker of texts but a designer of experience, accountable to the ear. Abercrombie’s intent reads like a corrective to the bookish habit of treating poems as puzzles for silent decoding. He’s insisting that poetry is closer to music and rhetoric than to literature-as-archive, and that the reader who never hears the poem is missing the art it was built on.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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