Alice Oswald publishes Rhapsody: A Manifesto on spoken poetry
Alice Oswald's Rhapsody: A Manifesto went on sale on 17 September 2026. The print edition is published by Jonathan Cape, The Observer reports. The eBook arrived the same day with 304 pages, according to the publisher's Australian listing.
Penguin Books hosts a dedicated page for the title under ISBN 9781787332218. The publisher describes the book as Oswald searching for poetry in its original, wildest form before it was written down, Penguin Books says. In a separate author listing it calls the work an exploration of poetry in its most vital form and a manifesto for the oral tradition.
The argument is about spoken verse. Oral tradition here means poems made to be said aloud and heard, passed on by voice before print fixed them on the page.
The book mixes old and new material. It contains poetry translated or composed by Oswald herself, alongside work by William Shakespeare, John Donne, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ted Hughes, The Guardian reports. It also includes retellings of Homer and Aeschylus.
One inclusion comes from beyond Oswald's own writing. The book carries a poem by Louise Glück, the American poet and Nobel laureate in Literature. The notes are extensive. The volume closes with 40 pages of endnotes.
Oswald held the post of Oxford professor of poetry until 2023. The lectures she gave in that role, a fixed-term chair that requires public talks as well as teaching, are available online.
The edition details trace the book through the trade. The eBook carries ISBN 9781529926248 and is issued under Vintage Digital, a digital-only imprint — meaning a named publishing line used for eBooks within a larger company, Penguin Australia lists. The print listing sits under the Jonathan Cape name.
What makes this stand out for a general reader is the structure. This is not a collected poems in the usual sense. It puts translations, retellings, borrowed poems and new writing side by side to trace how verse sounded before it was read silently from books.
