Chapter 6 - Praise and its purposes

Summary

In poems, as in other kinds of utterance, praise serves a variety of purposes, some obvious and others not. The intention is most plain to see where a poet addresses praise to another person in the hope of some benefit to come, or in acknowledgement of a benefit already received. Such occasions arose quite commonly in the case of what Nagy called here-and-now praisings. This kind of praise-writing has attracted much unfavourable comment in modern times, as when Byron accused Southey of gross flattery in his laureate poem on George III; but it played a reputable part in societies more traditional than our own. Such societies worked on what anthropologists call a ‘gift-exchange system’. This system (not altogether strange to us) imposed reciprocal obligations on giving and receiving and repaying; and in exchanges of this kind, poetic praise played a part, as Leslie Kurke has argued in her book about Pindar entitled The Traffic in Praise. ‘Praise poetry’, she observes, ‘is by its very nature a gift exchanged.’ Poetic praise, that is, may be offered in exchange for the excellences of the person celebrated, and the poem in its turn will call for gifts from that person to its author.

Much medieval praise poetry of the here-and-now kind can be understood in terms of such an ‘exchange economy of praise’ (Kurke, p. 101).