Notes

¹ 1942; rpt. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1951) 32. This is also the place to say that my essay takes foundational inspiration from Garrett Stewart's Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Univ. of California Press, 1990) and has been encouraged and everywhere improved by his eyes and ears. I'm also grateful for the benefit of Andy Elfenbein's careful and carefully informed conversations with me.
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² Lectures, 1808-1819, On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes; 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987) 2: 217, my brief italics.
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³ Stewart gives this passage pride of place in Reading Voices, the first epigraph of his Prologue (1). For quotations of Romantic poetry and prose, I assume sources are near enough at hand or keystroke, and so I cite no particular edition. Titles in quotation marks are, by editorial convention, derived from first line of untitled poems; italic titles are the poets' own.
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⁴ Lecture on Matthew Arnold, 1933 (towards the end); rpt. The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism (1933).
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⁵ To Paul Fussell's remark on the slowed time of slow time (Poetic Meter & Poetic Form [1969; Random House, 1971] 41), I'd even add the foot of and. For my fuller discussion of the poetics of silence in this ode (and companionable readers), see "The Know of Not to Know It: Returns to Keats's Urn," in Praxis : "'Ode on a Grecian Urn': Hypercanonicity and Pedagogy," ed. James O'Rourke, Orrin Wang & John Morillo (rc.umd.edu/praxis).
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⁶ Garrett Stewart's seminar will take us further, into an auditorium of potential auralities, sometimes with thematic import, that press into the auditions of reading and the arrays of textuality.
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⁷ Paradise Lost 2.541 for the first; then Satan in awe of God's high formalism over chaos's "formless mass" (3.708): "Confusion heard his voice, and wilde uproar / Stood rul'd, stood vast infinitude confin'd" (710-11)—with a dramatic halting of pentameter into spondees at –roar / Stood rul'd stood vast.
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⁸ The Manuscripts of The Younger Romantics, vol. XI, ed. Cheryl Fallon Giuliano (Garland, 1997) 60-61; I draw a bit on my introduction to the Penguin Don Juan (2004). Ney, having joined the king's army after Napoleon was exiled to Elba, rejoined Napoleon when his troops defected.
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⁹ "Milton," in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on Their Works; ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Clarendon, 2006) 1: 294; Johnson's italics credit another "ingenious critick" for the remark (William Locke).
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¹⁰ A comment recorded by Samuel Carter Hall, A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age, from Personal Acquaintance (London: Virtue & Co., 1871), p. 42.
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¹¹ I poach on Garrett Stewart's refined attention in Reading Voices 152-53.
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¹² Stewart follows the trail of Alight into an archaic past participle (kin to Alit), within the poetics that coordinate "sound and the medium of vision": "'A light in sound' becomes 'Alight in sound' in the double sense of 'brought to light' in sound (lit, lighted, imaginatively kindled) and descended, settled, or come to rest therein (alighted)" (ibid 153).
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¹³ The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), vol. 3: 3762. For fine attention to the sound qualities of Coleridge's verse, see Anya Taylor, "Coleridge and the Pleasures of Verse," Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001): 547-69.
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¹⁴ This is how it plays in Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765): "The lady shriekte and swound away" (Sir Cauline, 183); a drunk tinker is passed out "as if laid in a swound" (The Frolicsome Duke, 6); and lords laugh so hard they're "readye to swound" (The Beggar's Daughter of Bednall Green, 62).
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¹⁵ "Christmas Out of Doors," The Friend No. 19, December 28, 1809; The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton Univ. Press, 1969) 2: 257.
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¹⁶ A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2d edition (1759), Part II, Section XVII: "Sound and Loudness" (itself an echo of the sense).
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¹⁷ Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Harvard Univ. Press, 1958) 2: 171.
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¹⁸ For noting this semantically laden relation of sound, I'm indebted to Michael O'Neill, "'Driven as in Surges': Texture and Voice in Romantic Poetry (The Wordsworth Circle 38 [2007], 91).
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¹⁹ "Words, Wish, Worth" (1979; The Unremarkable Wordsworth [Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987] 99, 101-2). I give fuller attention to this passage in "What's Wrong with Formalist Criticism?", Studies in Romanticism 37 (Spring 1998) 77-94.
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²⁰ Note to The Thorn, Lyrical Ballads 1800; his italics.
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²¹ Dorothy Wordsworth had conveyed the verse in a letter to Coleridge, December 1798; The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787-1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2d edn. Rev. Chester L. Shaver (Clarendon Press, 1967) 239.
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²² "Poems, In Two Volumes," and Other Poems, 1800-1807 by William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Cornell UP, 1983) 464.
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²³ I follow the transcribed ms. (from a lost original) in Richard Woodhouse's letterbook; Rollins gives a slightly different rendition of the same ms. (Letters 1: 132).
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²⁴ "Keats," in Allusion to the Poets (Oxford UP, 2002) 175.
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²⁵ "My First Acquaintance with Poets," The Liberal 2 (April 1823); Hazlitt misremembers the phrase as Chaucer's.
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²⁶ To Sin's cry of Death in Hell's echo-chamber, "back resounded Death" (PL 2.789), the event is first sounded in "resounded" (finely noted by Stewart, Reading Voices 80). Wordsworth ceded this dead-success when he revised to "Sounding with grappling-irons" (1850 5.447; even as the double gerunds add a present intensity of recollection).

The phonologic of ears and sounded seems too deliberate for Cynthia Chase's slotting into "mute catachresis," meanings and signs linked only "by the accident of identity"; "The Accidents of Figuration: Limits to Literal and Figurative Reading of Wordsworth's 'Books'", Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 21, 27.
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²⁷ Noctes Ambrosianae, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine XLVII (December 1829), p. 872, cited by Samuel Carter Hall, A Book of Memories, p. 372.
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²⁸ Letters, The Early Years, 650.
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²⁹ Mont Blanc and Biographia Literaria were published late in 1817; I haven't been able to find evidence of cross-influence or a common source for the similar phrasing of "path of sound." A few years on, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (who read both poets) may have caught this strain with lighter luxury, closing "The Induction to the First Fytte" of The Improvisatore (1821) thus: "With finger springing light / To joyous sounds, the songster wight / First tuned his lyre, then danced along / Amid the mazy paths of song" (51-54).
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³⁰ William Keach's comment on Shelley's poetics of rhyme may illuminate the anagrammatics here and the metapoetics of sound in 30-34: the "verbal imagination structures and shapes, without giving a closed or determinate pattern to, an experience which defies structuring and shaping" (Shelley's Style [Methuen, 1984] 196). To Frances Ferguson the "linguistic tour de force" of the anagrams is a relational punning that underscores "the symbiosis of things and mind. . . . the inevitability of any human's seeing things in terms of relationship" ("Shelley's Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said," in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed [Cornell Univ. Press, 1984] 206-7).
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