To dream of dragons ere I sleep,
To dream that stars beam in the deep,
To dream to listen to a fé,
I go on dreaming anyway...
Poetry has been a part of writing fantasy since long before "realistic fiction" emerged as a genre. In fact, poetry has been a part of culture far longer than prose. Before widespread literacy, rhyming patterns and image-based narration were the best tools for ensuring that oral traditions could be passed verbatim along generations. I don't know very much about the history of the transition to prose, but in British literature, many of the epic romances that have founded our written culture lace their prose with poetry as a way of recognizing the most precious values of the world contained in letters. Thanks to Tolkien, modern fantasy authors draw on Medieval British culture more than any other culture in history, and poetry is part of the package.
For me, poetry is the most difficult part of writing fantasy. I'm bad at poetry to begin with. There's a sense of dream, of logic without explicit narrative structure, that I tend to seek out, but what I write always reveals that I'm trying too hard. Then I need to have a reason to write the poem. On its own, that's a relatively easy question: what's on my mind? But writing poetry to include in a book is virtually ghost writing. I'm saying something not just on behalf of myself, but on behalf of a character or culture I've made up, and the words and images I use need to match this. And when it's all done, it needs to make sense to the reader. Talk about compromising priorities!
All my favorite fantasy authors are good at this, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I'd be interested in hearing some more authors, anyone at all, who can pull this off well.
Poetry has been a part of writing fantasy since long before "realistic fiction" emerged as a genre. In fact, poetry has been a part of culture far longer than prose. Before widespread literacy, rhyming patterns and image-based narration were the best tools for ensuring that oral traditions could be passed verbatim along generations. I don't know very much about the history of the transition to prose, but in British literature, many of the epic romances that have founded our written culture lace their prose with poetry as a way of recognizing the most precious values of the world contained in letters. Thanks to Tolkien, modern fantasy authors draw on Medieval British culture more than any other culture in history, and poetry is part of the package.
For me, poetry is the most difficult part of writing fantasy. I'm bad at poetry to begin with. There's a sense of dream, of logic without explicit narrative structure, that I tend to seek out, but what I write always reveals that I'm trying too hard. Then I need to have a reason to write the poem. On its own, that's a relatively easy question: what's on my mind? But writing poetry to include in a book is virtually ghost writing. I'm saying something not just on behalf of myself, but on behalf of a character or culture I've made up, and the words and images I use need to match this. And when it's all done, it needs to make sense to the reader. Talk about compromising priorities!
All my favorite fantasy authors are good at this, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I'd be interested in hearing some more authors, anyone at all, who can pull this off well.
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