Bactra Review    The Psychology of Everyday Things

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One of the classic (literally!) examples of cultural constraints is found in oral epic poetry, such as the Iliad and Odyssey once were. In all known cases of living oral tradition, such poems are not memorized, but --- as Albert Lord put it in his great The Singer of Tales, ``composed in performance'' out of a previously-learned stock of ``formulas,'' ``blocks of lines'' and ``themes.''