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Poetry and Storytelling: Breathing Life into the Narrative

Poetry and Storytelling: Breathing Life into the Narrative
by Ted Olson

All-too-often considered different art forms today, poetry and storytelling were historically inseparable.  In Celtic society, poets (known as bards) memorized their culture’s myths and legends and transmitted those stories to others by creating and reciting narrative poems.  Employed by a patron—generally a chieftain or a lord—a bard was expected to tell persuasive and compelling if often somewhat fanciful stories in praise of that patron and his ancestors. 

For centuries after the decline of the bardic tradition, poets across the English-speaking world continued to compose narrative poems.  In the twentieth century, the ascendancy of literary modernism brought about a general rejection of narrative poetry. (T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land” perfectly illustrates that trend).  Not all twentieth century American poets, though, followed the modernist bandwagon toward abstraction.  Several poets—including Robinson Jeffers, Stephen Vincent Benet, Robert Penn Warren, and Elizabeth Bishop—became noted for composing compelling, and often quite long, narratives in verse form.

Although not the prevailing mode of poetic composition in contemporary America—there is, frankly, no prevailing poetic style in this heterogeneous country—narrative poetry still fascinates many American poets, particularly in certain sections of the nation.  Acclaimed author Robert Morgan, a native of the western North Carolina Blue Ridge, has asserted that Southern poets today are particularly skilled at breathing life into narrative poems.

But even as the narrative urge fell out of favor in English-language poetry, amateur as well as professional “storytellers” have honored the spirit of the bards by keeping the art of the narrative alive.  While perhaps not conveying their stories by means of structured “poetical” forms, the most skilled of these storytellers have often created oral narratives every bit as memorable and entertaining as many of the narrative poems that have been written down and published in books and magazines.

Indeed, because people throughout the ages have treasured well-spun yarns (humans seemingly have a deep psychological need to hear and to tell stories), the oral narrative has experienced a remarkable renaissance in recent decades. During this weekend, the storytelling renaissance will be splendidly evident in Historic Jonesborough, Tennessee, as the National Storytelling Festival undertakes its 39th annual celebration of an ancient yet still vital tradition.  As National Storytelling Festival founder and International Storytelling Center president Jimmy Neil Smith has observed, “There is no substitute for the power, simplicity, and basic truth of a well-told story, as millions of story lovers all over the world know.”  The bards of yore likewise knew that simple fact. 

The author and editor of numerous books, Ted Olson is a poet, a musician, and a scholar of Appalachian culture.  He teaches at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee—just a stone’s throw from Jonesborough.