The other day, as I was sitting around wondering where the world－and I with it－was going, I came to a thought. It is one of those typical thoughts that I have written a few times about in this column: I may have rediscovered something that every person already knew, or it is completely wrong, or it is a stretch of an imagination. In any case, this has not stopped me from expressing the thought, and it is not going to do it this time either.
When we go back a few millennia, we understand that language was an important invention for humans. It allowed us to communicate and transfer knowledge/ information/thoughts to each other. Last but not the least, we also come across cultures that had more of a written-word civilization and those with a spoken-word civilization.
Now if we look at poetry, we can conjecture that one of the benefits of poetry－aside from its beauty－is that because of the rhymes and the intonations, the actual words (message) are slightly easier to remember. Consequently, following these lines of arguments, you would expect that civilizations with a dominant spoken-word culture will be more receptive to poetry than to prose. At this time, however, I want to stress that I do not mean that there are languages with poetry and there are those with prose. All have all of them, but you would, nevertheless, expect in some civilizations and languages to have more poetry, than in others.
I am not sure if this hypothesis has been mentioned or whether even it makes sense, but I do know that the Middle East and Near East civilizations historically had strong spoken-word cultures. I also know that many of ancient holy books from this region were written in the form of poetry－albeit a very primitive form. I can also vouch that the Persian language, which is still practiced but dates back a long time, is full of poetry and in fact the most famous and loved writers in the Persian language are poets, not prose writers.
I am not claiming a scientific discovery nor am I denying that in western, Greek or Latin based languages, there are fantastic poets－who can ever deny the fantastic Iliad and Odyssey which are written entirely in poetry. I am just saying that in certain civilizations poetry may have been used to ensure the spoken-word transmission of wisdom and philosophy remains error-free.
Paris, February 26, 2024,
Zeejay