"Soundings of Things Done": The Poetry and Poetics of
Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era
Introduction
A forum convened by Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton University
-
Well, that was the title,
ably coined by Stuart Curran for the Keats-Shelley Association of America, that
we sent to the MLA, in glad cooperation with President Marjorie Perloff's
invitation for a Convention mega-colloquium on "The Sound of Poetry." The
editors of the Convention Program sighed, and shortened it to "Romanticism:
Poetry and Poetics of Sound," at
once killing off the resonant Sidney sound-bite,[1] and
foreshortening our sprightly leap from instance to theory, and our lovely apt
anagrams. Not poetic, that Convention bureau. But what they lacked in wit in
the program-prose they made up for in the resourcefulness of material doing:
they did manage to schedule this session of on verse in in a perversely narrow
wind-tunnel of a room in Philadelphia, 2006, where, too poignantly, hearing was
hard, we were told.
-
So we, and our
frustrated auditors, are especially grateful for Orrin Wang's invitation to
revise our essays for a new hearing in Romantic Praxis, promoted not
only from narrow wind-tunnel to worldwide web, but also released from the
torture to twenty minutes on the MLA's new LimiTimer: a branded
coinage, catchily two-sided, with a single shared T facing in opposite directions
at once, that reads like a lampoon of those blended phonetic effects in Romantic
verse that each of the speakers tries in various ways to keep in earshot—not
to mention a parody of romantic end-rhyme itself, with its metrically clocked
bounds of sound.
-
Our participants, now unbound, are, in
addition to me, Adam Potkay, James Chandler, and Garrett Stewart, and in our
auditorium, all those whom we quote. Adam has his ear to the sound of
Wordsworth's stanzas; Jim relays Wordsworth's Power of Sound into the
Sound of Power and what "sound overpowers" in the Intimations Ode and Shelleyan
coordinates; and the Master-Ear of the Phonotext, Garrett Stewart, catches the
Romantic phone-omenon in Romantic poetry, its reverberations in Victorian
imagination, and its resonance in cognition theory today.
Susan J. Wolfson
|