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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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