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Susan Wolfson, "Sounding
Romantic: The Sound of Sound."
Against the prized Romantic metaphysics of silence, this
essay investigates not only the sound of Romantic poetry, but its various,
multiple, often punning soundings of the word sound. That the
very romance of silence needs the sound of poetry to say so was experienced
by romantic poets and theorized in the phonic play of their poetry where
the word sound plays as a meta-trope of sonic registers,
whether heard or silently audited. This essay tracks, traces, and
registers the import of this situation across poetry by Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Southey, Blake, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Its most resonant claim is
that the sound of sound becomes the medium of conversation
with the sensorium of the external world, not only its nonsemantic noises,
but its auditorium of other voices, especially poets'.
[go to essay]
James Chandler, "The
'Power of Sound' and the Great Scheme of Things: Wordsworth Listens
to Wordsworth."
How did Romantic poets come to terms with new thinking
about the relation of sound and emotion in rhetoric and linguistics of
the late-eighteenth century? To address this question, Chandler
considers some examples in Keats and Shelley before turning to a late
poem by Wordsworth, "The
Power of Sound," which thematizes this very question of sound and sense. It
does so, moreover, by echoing a number of passages from Wordsworth's
poetry of the Great Decade, especially the "Immortality Ode," which Chandler
argues is a key intertext for the later ode. He argues further that
Wordsworth implicitly finds his earlier poetry wanting in theological
terms, especially in a key (echoed) passage from the pivotal stanza 9
of the "Immortality Ode" in which the poet speaks of "our noisy
years" in
relation to the "eternal silence." That is, he finds his earlier
poetry too much given to the free affective play of sound. For
the later Wordsworth, sound schemes signify larger schemes drawn from
the Christian Bible.
[go to essay]
Garrett Stewart, "Phonemanography:
Romantic to Victorian."
Stewart demonstrates the legacy of Romantic sound play—the
undertext of lyric writing in its phonemic activation—as an influence
on Victorian poets and novelists. Keats and Shelley experiment
with the "phonotext" in ways taken up by Arnold, Hardy, and Tennyson.
But there is also the Wordsworthian "underpresence" of subvocal effect
in Dickens and George Eliot, most strikingly in Little
Dorrit and The
Mill on the Floss. Building on the writings of Mladen Dolar, Friedrich
Kittler, and especially Giorgio Agamben, both his book Language
and Death and his essay "Philosophy and Linguistics," Stewart
finds in the latter's conception of "present contingency"—or in other
words, in a sense of "potentiality" that
can be immanent even in its apparent exclusion—a tentative philosophical
model for the sub- or cross-lexical phonic charge of Romantic poetics
and its prose derivations.
[go to essay]
Adam Potkay, "Captivation
and Liberty in Wordsworth's Poems on Music."
This essay addresses the Orphic power of music to seduce
and distract—to wring the will of its freedom—in a way that
is not incompatible with civic liberty. To flesh out this theme,
Potkay looks at two poems from Wordsworth's 1807 Poems,
in Two Volumes:
the entrancing "Solitary
Reaper" and the poem in which Wordsworth directly addresses the allurements
of sound, "The Power of Music." In these poems, "the music
of harmonious metrical language" mimics the power of vocal
or instrumental music to distract from both meaning and purposeful activity. But
music, for Wordsworth, is no mere drug; still less is it a threat to
society. Although
sound may induce reverie, it nonetheless brings individuals together,
apart from an over-busy world. The immersion of musical pleasure
serves as a counter-force to the commercial spirit over which Wordsworth,
no less than many of his American reviewers, worried.
[go to essay]
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