Long Live Alliteration! by Robert Rickard

Long Live Alliteration!

New Perspectives on Alliteration in Poetry Conference, 1st September 2025, at the University of East Anglia – a view from the hall.

Part of Forgotten Ground Regained: A Quarterly Journal of Alliterative VerseNew Series 8, Fall, 2025

Robert Rickard

What a day to savour, and what better way to pinch-punch the new month with a Monday munching over battle raps before breakfast; lays at lunchtime; sagas after sunset!  

The deceptively dry-sounding title masked a conference (organised by the indefatigable Dr. Tim Anderson of UEA) covering a remarkable range of alliterative verse across the world and time.  

The long day slowly simmered into a sort of sound-miracle: not simply a tribute to the depth of alliterative expertise in those turning up, but in the practice of writing and reciting what clearly turns out to be a living language, form and tool. Yet all this in what might seem to most a pretty arcane alleyway of wordsmithing; and from a plethora of places from Oxford to Oregon, Madagascar to Texas, Utah to Otaga, the Great Lakes to London, Stockholm to Hong Kong, Lincoln to New Jersey - and many more. 

What a witness to the many living languages sharing chiming, rhyming runes and rites – in ways and tongues unknown to most present, I suspect. And what more appropriate setting than the City of Literature?  [Warning in this write-up: an alliterative urge starts to sting, so pleas for forgiveness if it affects one observer’s view of events… .]

Though many may have known childhood cartoons and tales, of Thor and Odin, Freja and Loki, picturing Vikings in vivid, violent victories in vague Northern places, before this bewildering array of lectures (‘across five continents’, as David Nowell Smith put it) who present or screening could have considered that alliterative verse still is savoured and very much matters to so many?

And of what did the speakers sing their spectators?  Here are four sample highlights this one listener happened to hear (though NB: there were fifteen others): 

Paul Deane came from America specially to set the scene with infectious lightness of touch on the whole ‘alliterative revival’; ushering us swiftly through well-known ‘cultists’ of Anglo-Saxon history, myth and verse: Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; but also via less obvious contributors: William Morris, W.H. Auden (who liked his names sounding Old English), and Rudyard Kipling (in a 1904 poem framed as an automobile advertisement).  And much much more.  His website, Forgotten Ground Regained, is probably definitive.

Harriet Truscott of UEA then showed our group how typographical spaces matter in writing—for example, in the distinctive half-line break or ‘caesura’ in much older alliterative verse, as well as Modernist poems by people like Pound.  This reminded me of others: famously, Emily Dickinson giving us pause with her hyphens (infamously eradicated by her early publishers); but also of lesser-known poets - one the present writer is researching, Arthur Sale, let his words breathe and ‘inter-connect beyond their prose syntax’; but who also (as Paul Deane coincidentally re-discovered) dabbled in alliterative verse. 

Margaret Ann Noodin then showed how the oral expression of the Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes (not written down till the late eighteenth century, apparently), oozes alliteration from every pore of every word; she demonstrated these in the gentlest, touching ‘phonemes folding, waves of words’, of an indigenous language, now clinging to life in modern America.

Selene Genovese then showed us similarities in the opposite-seeming other end of makking/marcatura: made clear how the two thousand year-old written tradition of Latin still bubbles with alliterative plays - specifically in the pointed Roman-dialect satires of a thirties’ poet named Trilussa.  

In all this I couldn't help starting to ponder a much wider question: one I really wasn’t expecting on such an arcane alliterative day. This concerns perhaps the central problem in modern English poetry: against all the tongue-twisters sonorously-sounding across the Julian Study Centre, might mainstream contemporary verse not seem all the more ‘stuck’? All the more lost in its (generally) limp linguistic limbo?  (By this, think the rapid decline in ‘popularity’ from a time when a Tennyson was a true media star; since 'the collapse of language' (Sale), the not-often now even reported ‘dumbing-down of words’ in the mass media. Any sort of poetic tradition may be drying up into separate small pools: what’s taught in schools (and that shriveling in the inscrutable face of the ‘Knowledge-Based Curriculum’…); navel-gazing free-verse droned out to hesitant clapping in a very few open-mic nights in backrooms in bars; lyrics parked on plinths of ‘folk ballad’ or birthday-card ditty.  

And yet: some need for poetic expression persists, is present in every love-lorn, political pop song; still sometimes surfaces – in sincerely-sung sentiments: penned for weddings and funerals.  What the wide-ranging rhetoric of UEA’s Alliterative Conference made this bystander consider was that as the day rolled on, and forty-plus people present from across our sphere shared their obvious love for still-vibrant alliterative soundscapes, might they be being offered some obvious clue – or at least one hiding in plain sight – as to how to make a living – shared – poetic language sing again?  Might alliterative, rhythmic and even spatial aspects of the ‘old worde craft’ still have a place, as a tool to make our words sing more simply, more passionately?  

After all - I pondered the next day, playing with my grandson - our first words are all alliterative.   Even writing this write-up, the tuneful tendency – whatever the wellspring – seemed on the day towards a rich, spoken and listened-to verse.  After exposure, almost impossible not to hear the chiming consonants, sibilant shivers, assonant nuances, that bind each phrase, and – more importantly, some of the talks suggested – move it on.  

Might alliterative sounds and pulses even drive the music of contemporary poetry - whether Browning or Bolivar (Adam, who travelled from Oregon to UEA, and is one of an elite band of professionally-practising Anglo-Saxon poets I didn’t even know existed!)?  

Finally (not just to show the impulsive enthusiasm is still measured!): I readily confess my own inner muse-jury is still out on Anglo-Saxon reconstructions and translations.  The conference evening culminated in impromptu readings in the unlikely gardens of the Georgian House Hotel, seducing us with their incredible range: gory, guttural authentic compositions by the (virtuosic) Rahul Gupta; meticulously-pinpoint English realisations by the afore-mentioned Adam Bolivar; wonderfully-crafted mock-epics by Martin Vine (cf. a Cædmon-prize winning baby dragon guarding its hoard); and on to Paul Deane's wittily-/chillingly-observed imagining – in lightest, loose prosody – of the chilly demise of (Elon) Musk's future Mars settlers.  Though all this too (particularly the last) sang us how Anglo-Saxon rhythms and sounds can, still, feel substantial and resonant, still they seem to me something from another language.  

Possibly because they are… . Nevertheless, though such a freely-voiced verse may or may not be compatible with the more or less syllabic tradition gradually predominating from Chaucer on in mainstream literature, it does not mean these invigorating soundscapes don’t still have a real – perhaps unexpected? – place in helping modern poetry regain real voice and vigour.  Why? Because alliterative verse generally sounds like it needs such speaking aloud, not muttered by isolated poets in garrets.  Older ones (like Margaret Ann Noodin’s Ojibwe…) never written down, and so written to be remembered – and recited. 

First Published in Forgotten Ground Regained, New Series, Issue 8, Fall, 2025