Rappers and preliterate poets

I’m just reading this book called “The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature“, the section on Old English Poetry. It is explaining how Old English poetry follows certain rules, strange to the modern poetic ear, like the fact that lines don’t have to be the same length or rhythm or have some rhyme scheme, that in fact alliteration is the rule. The author makes the point that the variability of lines and rhythms makes the verse fall closer to the conversational language than formal iambic verse, for example. And then this passage, which struck me as a strikingly accurate portrait of freestyle rap:

Yet the verse is generally far from conversational in manner. On the contrary, it displays, as archaic poetry often does, a highly elaborate and conventional language of its own, distinct from common vocabulary and idiom, such that the listening ear can clearly distinguish it as the product of a mastered art — the art of the bard, or, as Anglo-Saxons called him, the scop. …[T]his poetic idiom must go back, in many of its essential features, to an early preliterate age, when the poet, exercising his skills in the very presence of his audience, relied on a stock of ready-made formulaic and unhesitating flow of well-formed alliterative verses.

The rapper is the new scop.

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