The Wondering Minstrels: Abraham Thomas's poem-a-day mailing list, 1999–2007
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The Wondering Minstrels was a poem-a-day mailing list and online poetry community created by Abraham Thomas, which ran from February 1999 to January 2007. Every day it emailed subscribers one poem with a commentary: critical analysis, biography of the poet, historical context, anecdotes and trivia. At its peak it had over 5,000 subscribers. Abraham Thomas was its founder and main driver; Martin DeMello was co-editor, and Sitaram Iyer managed the website. The complete archive of poems, commentaries and reader comments is at abrahamthomas.info/minstrels.
Key facts
| What it was | A poem-a-day mailing list, with a web archive where readers discussed each poem |
|---|---|
| Years | 8 February 1999 to 21 January 2007 |
| Founder | Abraham Thomas |
| Co-editor | Martin DeMello |
| Website manager | Sitaram Iyer |
| Subscribers | Over 5,000 at its peak |
| Poems sent | 1,969, by 755 poets |
| Guest contributors | 428 readers submitted 1,122 "guest poems" with their own commentaries |
| Reader comments | More than 6,000, preserved in the archive |
| Archive | abrahamthomas.info/minstrels; an older copy is at wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com |
Who created the Wondering Minstrels?
Abraham Thomas created the Wondering Minstrels in February 1999, while working as a quant at Simplex Asset Management, and was its main driver throughout. Martin DeMello was co-editor, and Sitaram Iyer built and managed the website and archive. All three were alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology. The list began informally: as the founders put it in a later interview, “it just started off as us mailing a few friends our favourite poems, and snowballed from there.”
The first poem, sent on 8 February 1999, was W. B. Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus.
What did it do?
Each day, subscribers received one poem by email with a commentary. The list’s own FAQ described the commentaries as “personal commentaries, critical analyses, poet biographies, historical asides, trivia, links – basically, anything that catches our fancy”, and its aim as challenging “the widely held belief that modern poetry – indeed, ‘serious’ poetry of any sort – is ‘hard’, that it requires special skills and training to appreciate.”
At first the editors wrote every commentary. Over time, readers sent in poems with their own commentaries (“guest poems”), and by the end 428 guest contributors had submitted more than half of all poems. The web archive let readers discuss each poem, and some discussions continued for years after a poem was sent.
How popular was it?
| Date | Scale | Source |
|---|---|---|
| October 2003 | 2,265 daily email recipients | Murtuza, PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin (2010), citing the Minstrels website |
| 2006 | "a poem-a-day mailing list of over four thousand people"; "one of the most visible online poetry sites at the moment, with very high search-engine rankings" | Gopalakrishnan, master's thesis, MIT (2006) |
| Peak | Over 5,000 subscribers | Abraham Thomas |
In a 2017 interview, the founders recalled that the site reached a Google PageRank of 8 out of 10; that Rice University, which hosted the original archive, noted it “used more bandwidth than the rest of the computer science department combined”; and that it appeared on a list of the 50 most bookmarked sites on the web. Readers who left comments included Sir Arthur C. Clarke, on G. K. Chesterton’s Lepanto (2003).
Academic study and press
The Wondering Minstrels was studied as an example of online literary community, fandom and the global reach of English poetry:
- Web of Words: Poetry, Fandom and Globality, Amulya Gopalakrishnan, master’s thesis, Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006, supervised by Henry Jenkins. A study of the Wondering Minstrels, “a largely South-Asian community on the Web dedicated to the celebration of English poetry.” (pdf)
- “Play Up, Play Up, and Play the Game”: Public Schools and Imperialism in British and South Asian Diasporic Literature, Miriam Rafia Murtuza, PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2010. Discusses the Minstrels’ readers’ responses to Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada”, which Abraham Thomas sent in November 2001. (pdf)
- A Conversation About National Poetry Month, MIT Technology Review, May 2005, which described poem-a-day groups like the Wondering Minstrels as “anarchic celebratory spaces that upset the stiff seating arrangements of most books on poetry.” (pdf)
- Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education, Henry Jenkins, MediaShift, July 2006: “a global network of poetry lovers.” (pdf)
- Can One Be a Fan of High Art?, Henry Jenkins, July 2006, on Gopalakrishnan’s thesis and the Minstrels as a fan community built around poetry. (pdf)
- Three Men and a List (to say nothing of the blog), Fundamatics, 2017: an interview with Abraham Thomas, Martin DeMello and Sitaram Iyer. (pdf)
Where is the archive now?
The complete archive is at abrahamthomas.info/minstrels, with every poem, its original commentary and its reader comments. It can be browsed by date, by poet, by contributor, by theme, by title and by first line. Poems are reproduced under fair use.