Is tragedy choral? Let us return finally to the question of origins, but let us do so while keeping strictly to the poetical, narrative and ritual dimensions. We will now be able to draw some conclusions regarding the pragmatics of the tragic choral voice – both masculine and feminine – as it is orchestrated by the poets who stage, in the service of the city, an action belonging to its heroic past.

The use of the present tense to refer to the past in summary narrative, that is, narrative passages where small stretches of discourse time cover large stretches of story time, depends upon the idea that the designated events are currently accessible through the medium of the discourse. The present tense serves to highlight the importance of the designated events for the development of the discourse. This diegetic use of the present has a predilection for certain attention-management strategies, such as cataphoric reference and complex clause structure, which puts the main clause event in focus within the wider discourse context. More specifically, the diegetic present has two main functions: marking changes in the narrative dynamic, and marking changes in the status of referents.

Is there a way to understand a poem as an intertwining of thought and feeling? If every art, according to Pater in The Renaissance, has “its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm,” “its own special mode of reaching the imagination,” and “its own special responsibilities to its material,” then can we also understand poems to offer unique instantiations of thought, which are inextricable from their imaginative, sensuous, and affective dimensions? Previous chapters have considered the value of poetry as a type of linguistic attentiveness and play, as a practice of vocalization and inscription, and as a way to map the complexities of subjectivity. This chapter follows up on those considerations in order to think about how poems might think, and about how both writers and readers might approach a poem as a crystallized yet open process of thinking and feeling. Not only the presentation of a speech act, nor the account of a subjectivity in formation, nor the formalized play of language, a poem can also depict and spur a process of thought that is, as it were, felt. Via readings of poems by Tracy K. Smith, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Lisa Robertson, this chapter aims to show how poets map and process thought, and how readers think their way through poems.

Arden of Faversham contains an unusual number of characters, both main and minor, who tell stories. The main storyteller, Franklin, is the play’s only fictitious character – one who has affinities with another story–teller of the same name in a collection of tales, Chaucer’s Franklin. This essay argues that the authors of Arden use the story-telling characters to explore the function of narrative within drama.