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I was just listening to a programme about the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle on Radio 4, which was interesting but spoiled by terrible readings of the poet’s work. Why on earth does the BBC repeatedly air acted readings of poems that tend to smother the poem beneath a veneer of theatricality? So often the voice comes across as pompous, precious, and suggestive of a nervous, agitated disposition. Are they deliberately trying to reproduce a stereotype of the poetic psyche?

It’s not so much that the BBC hires bad actors. In this case the actor was Sara Kestelman, who has a distinguished career behind her. Poets themselves are often not the best readers of their work, though in many cases they are, and actors are in possession of an array of techniques that would help many poets improve their delivery. So actors ought to be able to do poetry a service. If they don’t manage this, it must be something to do with the approach they or their directors take, rather than with their ability.

In this particular case, Hilda Doolittle’s poems were read in a breathy, dramatic whisper that was probably supposed to sound atmospheric. But I just sat there thinking, ‘What on earth are you doing? Nobody reads poetry like this!’. I was unable to focus on the words. Any atmosphere the poetry might have conjured up was obscured by the atmosphere of the voice. And whatever accents and tones the words might have possessed were squashed by the reader’s tone of voice.

It’s as if actors are more concerned with exhibiting their performance skills than with conveying the material they are supposed to be delivering. Or are directors perhaps not convinced that anyone is really interested in poetry, so instruct their actors to compensate for what they perceive as the lack of content in the words?

This is something I’ve been wondering about for years. My main theory is that actors are used to acting dramatic dialogue, where conventionally every line belongs to a character, i.e. it is the product of a unified personality. Moreover, when scriptwriters write dialogue, they will often be thinking about things like the situation in which the lines are uttered, the objectives of the character, and their relation to the character they are being addressed to.

While some poetry is characterised by these features of dramatic dialogue, very often it isn’t. It’s not always clear who the speaker is in a poem, what the context of its utterance is, and who it’s being addressed to. A lot of the time poetry is multi-accented, that is, its meaning can seem to pull in several different directions, and much of its effect may come from the tension or play between those different orientations. If someone tries to read poetry as dramatic dialogue, they are likely to end up fixing the context and meaning, and therefore lose this kind of tension or play.

This reminds me of Valentin Voloshinov’s discussion of ‘quasi-direct speech’ (nesobstvennaia priamaia rech´, a Russian translation of Gertrude Lerch’s uneigentlich direkte Rede) in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. In quasi-direct speech a single linguistic construction conveys the meanings of two differently oriented voices. An example might be a sentence in a novel that seems to convey the meanings of both the author and a character, and where neither is dominant over the other.

In a discussion of the use of this form of speech in Russian modernism, Voloshinov describes quasi-direct speech as a linguistic phenomenon that is specific to the written word and which cannot be effectively conveyed through speaking:

In the majority of cases, and namely there, where quasi-direct speech becomes a mass phenomenon in the new artistic prose, the acoustic transfer of evaluational interference is not possible. What’s more, the very development of quasi-direct speech is connected with the transition of the major prose genres to a silent register. Only this silencing of prose made possible that multi-levelled and orally unconveyable complexity of intonational structures, which is so characteristic of the new literature. (Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka, 1929, p. 377, my translation. See Part III, ch. 4 in the English edition.)

If you believe Voloshinov, then you might conclude that the reason the BBC broadcasts such terrible acted versions of poems is that it simply isn’t possible to read a lot of poetry out loud properly; oral reading fixes the voice one way or the other, and loses what isn’t fixed.

I disagree. Poets have been finding ways of performing their work in ways that do manage to preserve the lack of centredness and multiple accents their words sometimes carry for decades, possibly centuries (although it’s more of a modern phenomenon). It doesn’t necessarily mean reading in a straight, uninflected way at all, and the more acting skills a speaker has the better they’ll probably be able to carry it off. But it does mean ditching the notion that poetry should be uttered as if spoken by an individual character.