Bill Caraher |

In the summers, I do archaeology and I’ve always fantasized about a special section of NDQ dedicated to archaeology and poetry or perhaps even archaeological poetry. I’m not sure what this would look like, but there was a time when archaeologists dabbled in poetry. I’ve even posted the not inestimable (but not entirely estimable) poetry of Rhys Carpenter to this very blog (in fact there was a time in the distant past where I was Rhys Carpenter Fellow at a research institute in Greece!).

As I restlessly looked around for some idea of what archaeological poetry could be, I stumbled on this great little 110 year old article from long defunct Mid-West Quarterly (1913-1918) titled “Poetry and Archaeology” by the poet and critic Robert Shafer.

You can read it here for free.

It’s well worth the read even if I lose track a bit what this poetry has to do, necessarily, with archaeology. The observations on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and William H. Davies are really quite amusing if nothing else. All this seems to anticipate works like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons published the same year as the article.

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Bill Caraher is sometime archaeologist, sometime historian, and editor of NDQ.