ABSTRACT
Verse-speaking, like singing, can be either an individual matter or a group activity. Although music lovers accept choral singing as part of our musical heritage, many students of poetry have a violent antipathy to the practice of choral verse-speaking. Reading poetry aloud to an audience, however large or small, involves a delicate relationship between the speaker, the poem and those to whom it is being read. The reader has to act as proxy for the poet; he must interpret his lines by the quality of his reading and through the depth of his sympathy and understanding, but he must never snatch the poem out of the poet’s hand. The poem must always be more important than the speaker, the message more important than the vehicle which carries it. Members of verse-speaking choirs are often surprised at such evidence of their own vocal potentialities and become as a result more confident and mature as individual speakers of poetry.
