> Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write. The Illiad and Oddyssey were composed and passed down b

> Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write. The Illiad and Oddyssey were composed and passed down by illiterate bards. Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally oral thing. For examples of this see Serbian epic poetry > Many of the epics are about the era of the Ottoman occupation of Serbia and the struggle for the liberation. With the efforts of ethnographer Vuk Karadžić, many of these epics and folk tales were collected and published in books in the first half of the 19th century. Up until that time, these poems and songs had been almost exclusively an oral tradition, transmitted by bards and singers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry