A ‘Review’ of Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry

Is this really a review of Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry? It seems a bit strange to review a book that is almost twice as old as I am, particularly when I don’t especially want to review it, if a review is meant to offer a critical vantage on the work under consideration. What I want to do is proselytize. I want to convince you, a reader and writer of poetry, that you must read this book, and that whatever your prior experience of or interest in biblical poetry, your poems will be worse and your life will be poorer if you don’t.

I want to convince you of this not because ABP is a flawless book, but because understanding biblical poetry, or at least trying to, is a prerequisite for understanding poetry in any European or Middle Eastern language, and for English speakers Alter’s book remains the best in class. Really, I think you should just stop reading this, whatever this is, and go buy, borrow, or steal a copy of ABP. Failing that, here are three arguments to get you over the line.

What Even Is a Poem?

Sometimes it can be useful to ask ourselves what the hell a poem actually is. Not because there is a neat, non-controversial answer to the question (I suspect that if there was, we would have found it by now), but because attempting to answer it is one way poets, critics, and readers have tended to inquire about poetry’s aesthetic core, and which techniques can instantiate it.

I am not going to say too much about how Alter articulates the relationship between what a poem is and what it should be in the Hebrew Bible (what did you take this for, a review?), but I think the account he offers is subtle, suitably heterogeneous, and therefore useful. Alter recognizes that genres are always partly established by fiat, this is a poem because I, the poet, say so, and partly by the vagaries of cultural consensus, this is a poem because the reading public or my publisher says so, and that any attempt to offer a more substantial definition has to be made with that background in mind.

He proceeds to define poetry with due caution. He argues there is no one thing that makes a biblical poem a poem, and that insofar as we can define what poetry is in the Bible at all, it will have to be through understanding how the full range of semantic, syntactic, and sonic traits work in tandem, building toward a recognizably poetic form of intensified patterning. What is meant by patterning, or intensified, is inseparable from the aesthetic instincts of poets and their audiences. Poems are only recognizable as such in light of the poetics from which they came.

Blow on the Embers

As one might expect, many of the formal aspects of biblical poetry are disorienting for a twenty-first century Anglophone reader. The parallelisms so dear to the poets of Iron Age Judea and their audiences have little immediate, instinctual purchase on us. Part of what ABP does is gradually convince the Anglophone reader that they can appreciate the poetics of the Bible, even through the barrier of translation, if they are willing to blow on the embers gently.

I suspect, though I cannot prove it, that a number of poets in the nineties and the early two thousands read this book and had a go at adapting parallelism, mostly semantic parallelism, into English. If the idea of importing a structure from another language sounds fake or flimsy, bear in mind that poets have been pulling this trick forever, including with languages they do not speak natively, well, or at all. A great deal of Persian poetry, Urdu poetry, and Arabic poetry would not exist without all kinds of ad hoc mutual borrowing, and the same is true of English poetry and Latin poetry, German poetry and Provençal poetry.

So what is parallelism? Alter opens ABP with a paradigmatic, and therefore highly unrepresentative, example: six lines from the Song of Lamech in Genesis, in which a man addresses his two wives about a killing he has committed and the vengeance he expects to be exacted for it. Alter walks through his own translation of the passage line by line, and shows that it combines parallelism of at least three kinds at once. The two halves of each line echo each other semantically, with every image or idea in the first half restated in different words in the second. They mirror each other syntactically too, with the word order of each half-line matching the other, term for term. And on at least one reasonable reading of how the lines were likely stressed when first composed, the two halves even carry matching rhythms, though as Alter is careful to note, we cannot know for certain exactly how stress fell in the mouths of the poets who first composed the Hebrew Bible.

Perhaps that familiarity exists because parallelism, as the critic Viktor Shklovsky argued in a passage Alter cites approvingly, is a general feature of literary expression: that noticing a disruption inside an otherwise harmonious pattern is central to how parallelism works, and that its purpose, like the purpose of imagery more broadly, is to shift our usual perception of a thing into something newly strange. Or perhaps it is because there are deep continuities between the development of poetry in European and Middle Eastern languages, and the two principal literary lodestars for those cultures, Greek philosophy and Abrahamic religion, keep being reinscribed into modern iterations of those languages. Think of the incessantly repetitious stanzas of Eliot, and the influence not only of the Bible itself but of every intermediary religious poet whose style was also shaped by it, Dante most prominent among them. If you wanted to be grand about it, you could claim that reading Alter offers a glimpse into the durable core of English poetry, and French, and German, and on and on.

Why Write This If No One Reads It?

Poetry is a marginal genre of a marginal art form, one set to grow more peripheral to culture at large at the hands of forces we need not go into right now. A handful of instapoets and viral names aside, poets whose work you might encounter through a close reading in a place like our own library, the most important and popular poets of our time have a few thousand readers at most, and many of them substantially fewer.

Some poets do not find this disturbing. They would argue, with some justification, that poetry has always been marginal to some degree, and that poets should respond to that fact by directing their art toward an immediate community of reception rather than chasing importance to culture at large, whatever that is supposed to mean. Anyone not wholly satisfied with that answer has to take their consolation from some future audience, however dimly glimpsed and potentially nonexistent. For that kind of poet, ABP is a balm. The story it tells is the story of generations of scribes and scholars who spent their lives preserving, reconstructing, and reinterpreting poems composed, in the first instance, by nameless Iron Age Judeans. A poem, for all its faults, is extremely hard to kill.