The Odyssey is a central text in any discussion of ’the poet’s voice’ in Greek poetry. Not only is Homer throughout the ancient world a figure of authority and poetic pre-eminence against whom writers establish their own authorial voice, but also the text of the Odyssey demonstrates a concern with the major topics that recur throughout this book. For the Odyssey highlights the role and functioning of language itself, both in its focus on the hero’s lying manipulations and in its marked interest in the bewitching power of poetic performance. It is in the Odyssey, too, that we read one of the most developed narratives of concealed identity, boasted names and claims of renown, and the earliest extended first-¬person narrative in Greek literature. Indeed, the Odyssey is centred on the representation of a man who is striving to achieve recognition in his society, a man, what’s more, who is repeatedly likened to a poet.

In the sixth and final chapter, I consider the late poems and the curious prose work On the Boiler (1939), which includes the play Purgatory. I emphasize Yeats’s bardic sensibility, which is defined by relations of testament and bestowal and the double burden of witnessing the past and handing down bequests. Generational temporalities characterize the poetry in this period, inaugurated by the historical sequences in The Tower (1928). Yeats’s revivalist attitude toward time, future-oriented by way of a rectifying gaze cast on prior attitudes and achievements, continues to mature in the testamentary poems of this period, in which the modernist bard recreates, because he cannot sustain, a doomed Anglo-Protestant social order. These poems submit the heroes of the literary revival to new conditions of recognition, in which their greatness becomes an inheritance that Yeats, as their bardic representative, both announces and embodies in the world of his work. The antithesis of this inheritance can be found in On the Boiler, specifically in the play that concludes it, Purgatory. The play, Yeats’s last, is a Gothic distortion of the covenant at the heart of the testament. It subjects time and history, personal and cultural inheritance, to a withering critique that highlights both the intellectual pleasures and the potential dangers of the logic of misrecognition.

This chapter examineswhat happened to apostrophe, to invocation – to Wordsworth’s bardic stance as the voicer of the spirits of nature and of the dead—when he came face to face with modernity – with a Scotland and Lake District accessed via a mechanised tourist infrastructure: motion automated and at speed. Steam boats and railway lines, I argue, left him in a representational quandary. They not only disrupted his established ways of knowing nature visually but also challenged his self-chosen task of bringing the inner, spiritual meaning of place into voice by speaking for its dead. Rather than reject the new technology for that reason; however, he attempted to be its bard and to call its transformation of space and time into poetic speech.

The large body of surviving poetry and prose from medieval Wales contains many references to the performance and practice of music, to musical instruments and to the reception of musical events by both noble and urban audiences. The medieval Welsh word for music, cerdd, also signifies ‘craft’, ‘song’, ‘poetry’ or ‘musical instrument’, indicating the close links between music, poetry and the craft of making instruments. It also indicates that both music and poetry were regarded as a type of professional craft, moderated by their own particular standards and hierarchies. The commonest entertainments offered at the courts of the nobility in medieval Wales were poetry, storytelling and music, and these three arts were closely intertwined. Well-known examples include the poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym (c.1325–60) to his beloved as she plays the harp, while other references can be found in the prose tales of the Mabinogion. However, the private entertainments of the nobility and gentry were not the only occasions for the performance of music; travelling minstrels also performed in the streets of towns and at local fairs. This chapter examines a range of such references to music, performers and instruments in medieval Welsh literature, looking at the different kinds of entertainers, their professional hierarchies, the patronage of nobility and gentry and the popular entertainments characteristic of urban culture.

The dominant genre of secular music in medieval Wales was cerdd dant (literally ‘string craft’), a highly distinctive repertory played on the harp or crwth. Its delivery relied on highly trained professional instrumentalists, who worked in close partnership with Welsh strict-metre poets: both crafts were an intrinsic part of Welsh medieval ‘high culture’, linked to an exclusive bardic order. Though largely transmitted orally, some thirty items from the repertory were entabulated by the Anglesey harper Robert ap Huw c.1613. Cerdd dant largely retained its status until the 1560s, when the fashion for acquiring an English education gradually brought about a sea change in musical taste, effected by the importation of English tunes, texts, instruments and books. Some of the Welsh nobility nevertheless retained a loyalty to the practitioners of the traditional bardic crafts well into the seventeenth century, resulting in a mixed economy in some households, where vernacular music and poetry might rub shoulders with the latest English-style entertainments.