A curated collection of poems, premodern and contemporary, hosted at poetryfoundation.org
This symbol (/), the virgule, was often the only mark of punctuation used by medieval scribes copying English poetry. The virgule is the ancestor of the comma. Rather than indicating mutually exclusive alternatives, as in some cases in modern usage, the scribes’ virgule connected things. Like a virgule, this collection connects things. The bodies of work it connects are alliterative verse, an early poetic tradition exemplified in Beowulf, and contemporary North American avant-garde poetry.
Eric Weiskott 