Poetry is disseminated and encountered in collections, selections, and anthologies, in books and online, and is often thought of as a literary form. Indeed, text on the page or screen is essential to our understanding of some poetry, such as shape poems. Yet poems also come alive and generate meaning through recital in performance. Slam poems, for example, exist through performance, and performance is intrinsic to some poetry’s composition, particularly when improvised. In contemporary world societies we engage with performed poetry in diverse contexts, and by means of various media. Consider popular music and its lyrics, poetry’s most pervasive manifestation. The live performance of popular music can be experienced anywhere: a stadium; a field; a living room. We encounter its lyrics, chords, and melody in sheet music form, in notation that facilitates performances. We experience popular music via radio broadcasts, through sound and images resulting from the playback of audio and audiovisual storage media, and via the online streaming of live performances and music videos. These media and contexts can combine: for example, a DJ might utilise audiovisual storage media such as vinyl records, CDs, and computer hard drives in live performance.

We also encounter earlier or more traditional forms of poetry in numerous ways, and all cultures construct specific relationships between poetry and its reproduction in performance. These relationships are subject to change over time. Before the invention of the phonograph and subsequent recording and reproduction technologies allowed us to hear and see poetry in performance via amplifying horns, speakers, and screens, poems existed either in the mind, in writing, or in live performance. In a culture without either literacy or recording and playback technologies, poetry exists only in the mind or in live performance, being part of an oral tradition. The metre and form of Old English poetry developed in such a tradition, in a largely preliterate culture, before conversion to Christianity brought writing to sections of early medieval English society. Some poems in the Old English corpus may have been composed and transmitted orally before being transcribed. Accordingly, the ways in which the corpus relates to performance practices have also changed over time. Let us use the history of the most famous Old English poem, Beowulf, to consider this development.