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Oral-formulaic composition is a theory that originated in the scholarly study of epic poetry and developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It seeks to explain two related issues:

# the process by which oral poets improvise poetry
# the reasons for orally improvised poetry (or written poetry deriving from traditions of oral improvisation) having the characteristics that it does

The key idea of the theory is that poets have a store of formulae (a formula being 'an

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