Text as Song: The Oral Aspirations of Anghelos Sikelianos

Abstract

These statements were made by Sikelianos in a talk entitled 'O which he delivered in 1938, and in which he postulates a historical progression from text to voice, rather than the reverse process. They are the statements of a literate poet writing in a literate age, but delighting, at the same time, in the ability of radio to ‘reassert the spell of orality’ (Havelock 1986: 31). They subvert the idea of literacy as progress and propose, in its place, an ideal of post-textual orality. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between such statements and the poetry of Sikelianos.