Rhapsody: A Manifesto by Alice Oswald review – a history of the spoken word, from Homer to Ted Hughes

The poet Alice Oswald is no stranger to thinking in public about her art. She was Oxford professor of poetry until 2023, and her lectures are available online. But this is her first full-length book, and as such is something of an occasion.

So what exactly is it? For a work of prose it contains a lot of poetry, much translated or composed by Oswald herself. Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley and Ted Hughes also feature. Though nonfiction, the book is full of stories, particularly retellings of Homer and Aeschylus. It is billed as “genre-defying” and there is much formal experimentation. But at heart it is an exploration of the oral tradition, and the writer’s own subtitle is A Manifesto, which feels exciting and urgent, pointed at the contemporary world with its pressing realities.

Sure enough, the first chapter invokes both Homer and the spoken word as a living phenomenon, through Oswald’s encounter with a Ukrainian heart transplant recipient who tells her his story; references to David Bowie and Nat King Cole; Catalan folksong; and Badia Obaid, “a still-breathing Mesopotamian storyteller who was born in Baghdad”. This is important, for there aren’t so many passages in the rest of this book that engage with individuals or suggest real-world stakes for poetry.

Instead, the following nine chapters take us on an often fascinating, frequently beautiful path through poetry. A fabulous phrasemaker, endlessly able to transfigure the natural world, Oswald fills this book with revelatory lines: “woodland at night, when every tree gives off an applause of frightened birds”; reflections in water as a “liquid, impermanent, unstable gift of similarity”.

But where exactly do they lead? The final chapter offers a series of historical definitions of “rhapsody”, moving from “exalted expression” (1639) to “literary … miscellaneous or disconnected” (1764) and, by 1880, “an instrumental composition enthusiastic in character but of indefinite form”. In classical Greece, the rhapsode was the performer of oral poetry, and often peripatetic.

This Rhapsody isn’t just wandering about, however. It’s going in search of those moments beyond fashion, bluster or rhetoric where poetry really happens. This is the most controversial and elusive of quests: every poet since time began has felt they possess the secret, which is, on the contrary, the proverbial needle in a haystack. At one point Oswald even finds it in the space between two lines of verse.

This isn’t as ridiculous as it might sound. She’s looking at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87. For Oswald, the essence of this poem is in the tiny breath implied by a full stop and line break before a change of pace. “An apparition floats up, the same shape as the original speaker’s lungs,” she says. Oswald, herself a virtuosic performer, understands that something takes place when an audience is present that is about more than just words.

Perhaps this is why she frequently declares disdain for “scholars” and “academics”, though they’re all there in a chunky 40 pages of endnotes. Sometimes, though, the effect is of Oswald “alone of all her sex”, conversing with the great men of poetic history. Though she includes a poem by the late Nobel laureate Louise Glück, living poets are less present. Does this matter? Every writer has their own imaginative territory, after all. I think it may, for if poetry being composed right now is not addressed, we’re left with a manifesto not for poetry itself, but only for the performance of existing work.

It’s also disappointing that, echoing her fine early poetry in Dart and A Sleepwalk on the Severn, Oswald slips once again into using a running river as her default literary form. For in its very last pages Rhapsody turns out to be a call to arms on behalf of the natural world. Oswald understands this to be the true source of poetry as well as of our physical existence. As she will know, having edited an anthology of his work, Ted Hughes came to the same conclusion decades ago. That doesn’t stop it being true, of course. And important truths, like poems, bear repetition.