-
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 on verse in a perversely narrow
wind-tunnel of a room in Philadelphia, 2006, where, too
poignantly, hearing was hard, we were told.
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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.
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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. I
wonder about the sound of sound in Romantic
poetry. 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
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