From What Is Poetry?

A remarkable lecture given by Marina Warner at the University of Essex, and reprinted in her collection of writings on art and artists, Forms of Enchantment, takes as its starting point Tacita Dean’s work Footage (2011), which consists of photographs of feet: real feet, of children and mothers, the feet of ancient statues, and so on. Twisted, lame, imperfect feet feature prominently: Hephaestus, who was hurled down as a baby from Mount Olympus and twisted his limbs, which caused the other gods to mock him; Oedipus, whose name means ‘swollen foot’; the poet Byron, who suffered from a club foot; and the feet of Dean herself, who, one day finding her right ankle in excruciating pain, was diagnosed by doctors as suffering from a genetic condition known as a wing-bone, with the medical name processus posterior tali. ‘I felt very much,’ Dean said later, ‘like my Achilles heel had been discovered.’ Warner’s circling discussion links limping feet to shamanism (shamans often had a limp, like Oedipus) and to the ‘foot’ in poetry: ‘the hexameter has six feet; the iambic pentameter, the common “running rhythm” of English blank verse and also of much ordinary speech, has five feet and it lists as it moves, going di-dumm or da-doum’. At one point in the essay Warner discusses The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which recounts how the goddess Demeter spent her time searching for her daughter Persephone ‘with slender ankles’, abducted by the god of darkness to preside at his side in the underworld. Eventually it is agreed that Persephone can ...