Rhapsody: A Manifesto

'One of the finest living poets writing in English' Raymond Antrobus

A daring, genre-defying work of non-fiction from one of our greatest poets

Alice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form – before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice – and finds it still speaking all around us.

What begins as an attempt to ‘interview’ Homer becomes a thrilling exploration of an anonymous tradition that exists beyond authorship, spanning a world of singers, storytellers, mourners and listeners, of nightingales, grasshoppers and rivers.

Zigzagging through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, drama, interviews, artificial intelligence and sonnets, Rhapsody is a restless, miraculous exploration of poetry in its most vital form, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition.

At once intimate and expansive, Oswald invites us to listen to the voices that shape us, and to recognise poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.

Alice Oswald lives in Devon and has published several poetry collections, including Dart – a long poem about a river – and Memorial, a version of Homer's Iliad. She has been awarded the T.S Eliot Prize, Forward Poetry Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize and Costa Poetry Award. She was Oxford professor of Poetry between 2019 and 2024.

Contained in Alice Oswald’s Rhapsody is everything I hold dear. This book is a living, guiding, singing thing, a poem essay which flows over the edges of our contemporary formal limitations to revitalise language, to re-stage a lost play... Because her listening is singularly deep and nature-trained, it is so diverse, nimble, attentive and assured. It is genuinely thrilling to be swept into this wild mastery, this beating thinking heart-work. I can’t remember being as excited or as wholly engaged by a book in years. The words vibrate through you as you read, thronged by the living and the dead, human and animal in splendour and agony. It is a revitalising and radical manifesto. I will cherish it and revisit it as long as I live. -- Max Porter

Alice Oswald is one of England's most attuned, gifted and globally conscious poets ― and to my mind, one of the finest living poets writing in English. Rhapsody... asks its reader to listen closely to the language of transcendence, written and spoken, without ever losing sight of the earth, the air, the water. It is finely balanced: at once celestial and deeply grounded.... Rhapsody expanded me, tuning me back into the essentials of my own poetic craft. At its heart, it is a rapturous meditation on where the power of the internal imagination meets the external natural world ― and all of human worldliness in between -- Raymond Antrobus