The theme of a dialogue between body and soul is an ancient one in poetry. Melanie Challenger explains why she and John Kinsella found it so appropriate for this new exchange of poems.

Back in March, John and I exchanged several emails in consideration of the way we might express our ideas about flight, environmentalism, and the modern human condition. I suggested Chaucer's Parliament of Birds as a template and inspiration. John suggested the body and soul motif. It was immediately clear that the latter was the right one for our purposes, and as it happened I had not long finished my own translation and adaptation of one of the Old English body and soul poems.

In the next few weeks, John is going to write something more substantial about the motif, but the following is a brief explanation of the poetic tradition, for those that might not know it.

Two manuscripts to which we owe much of our greatly diminished number of early English poems are the Exeter and the Vercelli Books, which date from the tenth century. Both books contain soul and body debate poems, a tradition within the larger and widespread genre of debate poems. Poetic debates, which became particularly popular in the Middle Ages, took place between imagined opponents such as winter and spring. The typical body and soul version has the soul castigating the body for its lifelong sins, while ultimately describing its rotten fate of decomposition in the soils. Body and soul battle it out poetically as to which is to blame for this ruination. Other famous poems in the English tradition include the Disputation between the Body and Soul, a poem from the Middle Ages, and poems by Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan.

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