In oral culture, there is no separation between the poet and the poem. The author is a performer who vocalizes the words. Creation and performance are inseparably linked. Without writing, a ‘text’ has no existence outside the auditory performance. What matters is not fidelity to some invisible Platonic text, but the efficacy of the performance in casting a spell of heightened attention over the audience—whom the poet or performer can actually see. Purely verbal forms of poetry only emerged gradually, probably after the invention of writing, but the art’s musical origins were preserved coded in the meter and other formal elements. The development of phonetic and logographic writing systems made it possible to preserve the text of a poem on a page, and scribal technology gradually allowed poems to be written for the page. But even then authors were reluctant to sever the relationship between poet and singer. Until quite recently, poets still assumed that the typographic text would be vocalized in some way by the reader.
