Warrior Poetics

The famous poets have a vaguely defined but collectively shared character, a reputation which their work creates and supports. One imagines Wordsworth in the silly clothes of the English upperclass walking in rapture through an ordinary, but perhaps pretty field, gathering his thoughts on beauty so that he can go home and spend time shut up from everyone else writing poetry. One would not expect this Wordsworth to rise high in the military or run a business or to end up in a physical confrontation in a pub. The reputation of this poet is feminine (but rarely female), a little dandyish, in touch with feelings. And so too for poets in general.

Someone who writes poetry is necessarily someone who is literate, someone who has the luxury and education to spend time on art, and someone who is willing to express the conflicts of their interior life publicly. These three qualities in the vast majority of civilizations tend to be people who follow the reputation of Wordsworth in the sketch above. It is defined against traditional masculinity, the ruler/general/paterfamilias, who would not express his feelings or reveal his personal leisure, and even moreso against the peasant or tradesmen, who do not have any interest in poetry. As the act of writing poetry is an implicit social rebellion against the masculine taboos of spending time on such interior-facing luxuries, personal poetry tends to accentuate these rebellious qualities.

And this image is shockingly common across civilizations. The Chinese poets are either recluses or minor court officials, imagined as harmless men drunk on the beauty of nature. The Roman poets were cultural dandies even when glorifying the martial culture of Augustus. Dante as a pan-Italian culture hero was depicted walking, writing, and being hopelessly and shamelessly in love with a young girl. Sa’di, Hafez, and Rumi are all Sufis intoxicated by God and his love, encountered in the presence of wine and attractive Christian serving boys. The Romantics intentionally cultivated this image against the strictures of their dominant culture, and the French modernists leaned even deeper into refusing the cultural prescriptions of manliness. Women poets, while perhaps coded as masculine in comparison to the rest of their gender, never cross into the ideas of responsibility or martial prowess.

Even where the poet as person is as masculine as can be, the image of the poet created by his poetry follows the persona. Byron died after volunteering to join a war, and among his friends and his detractors it represented the Romantic longing for the absolute. Suleiman the Magnificent, most powerful sultan of the Ottoman Empire, conqueror of immense territory, and near victor in the siege of Vienna, signed all his poetry “Muhibbi” or “lover.” The warriors and kings who wrote poetry, not uncommon in the Ancient world, had to consciously assume a poetic persona different from their political propaganda. Even where the men have been warriors, the poets cannot be.

An exception, a crucial exception, is found in certain cultures, more used to warfare, more oral in literature. Here there was no requirement for luxury, the great poets described their own great deeds. There were powerful and elite, yes, but they got there through their strength and their poetry describes this. And in their strength they discuss the personal and even, sometimes, their masculine-coded feelings. It is here that we find the Skaldic Viking poems, composed according to careful meters by the great raider-landowners of the Pre-christian era. Egil Skallagrimson was renowned as a raider as well as a clever and careful poet, songs of praise, of drinking, and of death. Imprisoned and awaiting execution at the hands of his long enemy, Egil composed a poem of praise to his host in a new verse form, and his host released him in begrudging respect of his skill.

And now my lord,

You've listened long

As word on word

I built this song:

Your source is war,

Your streams are blood,

But my springs pour

Great Odin's flood*.

*Odin’s flood refers to poetry

Al-Mutanabbi, known by many as the greatest poet in the Arabic language, began his career living among the Bedouin and even lead a violent revolt against local powers. When he turned to poetry, he drew on the rich Arab tradition of praise in the most elegant of terms. And Al-Mutanabbi was skilled, sharper in wit and diction than he had been as a warrior, and he knew it well. His poems are full of praise for his friends and denigration of his enemies, but most of all of praise for himself. One of his poems insulted a certain Dabbah al-Asadi, who intercepted Al-Mutanabbi outside of Baghdad. He had a chance to flee, but the followers of Dabbah recited Al-Mutanabbi’s own verses on courage, and he died fighting at behest of his reputation.

I am the one whose literature can be seen even by the blind

And whose words are heard even by the deaf.

The steed, the night and the desert all know me

As do the sword, the spear, the scripture and the pen.

In the 1970s, in the South Bronx, the young black men who lived there were trapped in a world of poverty and violence. Roaming street gangs with military ranks controlled the borough, abandoned by governments local and national. They had little access to education or wealth, and were in a culture of extreme masculine and violent social expectations. But when some innovators began using turntable equipment to loop James Brown records at parties, some got up and began rhyme according to the meter of the drummer. They did not know Egil, nor did they did know Wordsworth, but they began to make this spontaneous form of masculine poetry known as Rap. Initially the rhymes were on the subject of the party and gathering itself, but as MCs began to make names for themselves, they earned renown for their abilities and the stories of their own life. Battles between the poets became a proving ground, and formed their verses into medleys of self-praise and other-defamation. The harsh realities of life during the crack epidemic of the 1980s, rappers adjusted their subject matter to the life of violence and competition that structured their social reality. And those that could innovate formally, put more rhymes into a single line, play with syllables and sounds, rose to the top of the hierarchy.

I came in the door, I said it before

I never let the mic magnetize me no more

But it's biting me, fighting me, inviting me to rhyme

I can't hold it back, I'm looking for the line

Taking off my coat, clearing my throat

The rhyme will be kicking until I hit my last note

Filled with self-praise, accounts of exploits violent and profitable, and innovative in its rules, Rap emerged even after the oral cultures had died off. Rappers, in their lyrics, their media, and their outward facing life actively cultivated the image opposite to the one of the poet - a warrior, a drug dealer or a mob boss who did not suffer fools, quick to violence, caring deeply about wealth over people, who had dropped out of school, preferring the world of struggle to that of the scholar.

Despite this, many of the best rappers got excellent grades in English class. In the life of a poet, the image rules.

Closing note: I wish I knew more about Skaldic and Arabic poetry, so don’t take this image as reality uncritically.