Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain

By Elizabeth K. Helsinger

In arguing for the crucial importance of song for poets in the long nineteenth century, Elizabeth Helsinger focuses on both the effects of song on lyric forms and the mythopoetics through which poets explored the affinities of poetry with song. Looking in particular at individual poets and poems, Helsinger puts extensive close readings into productive conversation with nineteenth-century German philosophic and British scientific aesthetics. While she considers poets long described as "musical"—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Emily Brontë, and Algernon Charles Swinburne—Helsinger also examines the more surprising importance of song for those poets who rethought poetry through the medium of visual art: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti. In imitating song’s forms and sound textures through lyric’s rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, these poets were pursuing song’s "thought" in a double sense. They not only asked readers to think of particular kinds of song as musical sound in social performance (ballads, national airs, political songs, plainchant) but also invited readers to think like song: to listen to the sounds of a poem as it moves minds in a different way from philosophy or science. By attending to the formal practices of these poets, the music to which the poets were listening, and the stories and myths out of which each forged a poetics that aspired to the condition of music, Helsinger suggests new ways to think about the nature and form of the lyric in the nineteenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Sep 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813938011

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Poetry and the Thought of Song

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

Elizabeth K. Helsinger.

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Helsinger, Elizabeth K., 1943–

Poetry and the thought of song in nineteenth-century Britain /

Elizabeth K. Helsinger.

pages cm. — (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3800-4 (cloth : acid-free paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8139-3801-1 (e-book)

1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Songs in literature. 3. Lyric poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Poetics—History— 19th century. 5. Music and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Language and languages in literature. I. Title.

PR589.L8H45 2015

821’.040907—dc23

2015002175

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

JEROME J. MCGANN AND HERBERT F. TUCKER, EDITORS

A spirit within the sense of ear and eye,

A soul behind the soul, that seeks and sings

And makes our life move only with its wings

—SWINBURNE

I should think it not rash to say that Pound learnt song as well as speech from the nineteenth century.—VERONICA FORREST-THOMSON

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Peculiar Music

1 The Persistence of Song

2 Song’s Fictions

3 Figures of Sound

4 Listening: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

5 Beyond Measure: Christina Rossetti and Emily Brontë

6 Telling Time: William Morris

7 Visible Song: Algernon Charles Swinburne

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

ONCE AGAIN, MY THANKS GO FIRST TO THE NATIONAL HUMAN- ities Center, where this book was begun during a year in residence as M. H. Abrams Fellow in 2007–8. As always, the beautiful surroundings, the wonderfully helpful staff, and the stimulating companionship of fellow-fellows proved an ideal environment to finish old projects and think through new ones. I’m especially grateful for the companionship and conversation of my now-colleagues Maud Ellmann and John Wilkinson, and of Judy Farquhar, Kate Flint, Ellen Garvey, Mary Ellis Gibson (already a longtime friend and generous host), Amélie Rorty, Terry Smith, and Alexandra Wettlaufer, all of whom made the time there both pleasurable and fruitful in so many ways. I am grateful too for the continuing support of the University of Chicago Humanities Division and its deans, Danielle Allen and Martha Roth, for allowing me this year and for other help, and to colleagues in each of my several departments (not least to the successive chairs of English Bill Brown, Jay Schleusener, and Elaine Hadley), but especially to the artist-faculty and graduate students of the Department of Visual Arts, which I chaired for two and a half years while writing this book; they opened whole new worlds of contemporary art-making to me and put up with an outsider’s efforts to understand.

Particular thanks to Herbert Tucker, who pushed me to say more about the thought of song while welcoming the project for his series, and to John Wilkinson and Michael Hansen, who carefully read and commented on the resulting discussion of poetic thinking in contemporary and earlier contexts. I’m grateful too for questions and comments from audiences at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago (Bradin Cormack, Jim Chandler, Bob von Hallberg, Richard Strier, Janel Mueller, Oren Izenberg, and Noa Steimatsky, all of whom had trenchant things to say about poetry, Swinburne, and the condition of music), the Nineteenth-Century Studies series at Birkbeck College (2013) and the English Institute at the University of London (a conference on Swinburne organized by Catherine Maxwell in 2009), panel sessions organized by Phyllis Weliver and Veronica Alfano at NAVSA meetings in New Haven and Montreal in 2008 and 2010; a special Morris session organized by Michelle Weinroth at the Canadian Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, also in Montreal in 2010; a plenary session of the INCS conference at the University of Texas, Austin, in spring 2010 (many thanks to Alex Wettlaufer for inviting me to give a keynote); and the Symposium on Pre-Raphaelitism and International Modernisms organized by Diane Waggoner, Tim Barringer, and Jason Rosenfeld at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in spring 2013; material later incorporated in various chapters was first ventured with these audiences. The editors and fellow contributors (particularly Florence Boos and David Latham) to a collection of essays on the politics of late Morris have been particularly helpful over the course of more than one working session of presentation and debate. And, by no means least, my gratitude to Cathie Brettschneider, humanities editor at the University of Virginia Press; to Mark Mones, for helping guide the final preparation of the manuscript; to Morgan Myers, for seeing the book through production; and to Colleen Clark, for copyediting.

Chapter 2 was originally published by the Modern Humanities Research Association in the 2010 Yearbook of English Studies (The Arts in Victorian Literature, edited by Stefano Evangelista and Catherine Maxwell), and chapter 6 in "To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss": William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams, edited by Michelle Weinroth and Paul LeDuc Browne (Queens-McGill University Press, 2015). An early version of one part of chapter 4 appeared in Victorian Studies (spring 2009); an audio of another part of that chapter (Tirra Lirra in a Mirror: Rhyming Visual and Verbal Form) can be heard on the website of the National Gallery of Art, Washington (http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/audio-video/audio/exhibition.html).

My greatest debts, however, are to my students. I’ve learned immensely from fine graduate student critics and poet-critics, both in my seminar on Lyric Forms, Blake to Hardy, over the past ten years (special mention to Stephanie Anderson, Bryan Chitwood, Hannah Christensen, Rachel Kyne, Connie Lu, Patrick Morrissey, Andrew Peart, Eric Powell, and Chalcey Wilding) and from others whose PhD work I’ve been fortunate to supervise, above all Michael Hansen and Erin Nerstad. A yearlong reading course with them led to many more conversations as we worked on our separate trajectories for defining and understanding shared questions. This book would not have taken shape as it did, nor been pushed through to whatever insights it may have to offer, without the continuing stimulation (not to mention the suggestions for reading) that emerged from our conversations. Read their books!

My family have continued to provide all kinds of stimulation, support, and love. Howie was willing to play with its ideas and reminded me of any number of passages and poets, then carefully read what became chapter 1. Without our years of listening together to music performed or recorded (and his amazingly eclectic tastes and no less broad collection of records, tapes, and CDs), I might never have been drawn to this subject in the first place. My son Aaron and daughter-in-law Erika Malchiodi never failed to ask me about the project and listen with interest even when my attempts to explain it fell very short. Both my son Alex, a much more sophisticated listener than I will ever be, and my daughter-in-law Sharon Kivenko, a dancer and gifted student of the anthropology of West African dance, helped me think about the entwinements of music with dance and ordered sound with ordered gesture, not least when they shared their experience of Malian music and dance on a wonderful trip to visit them there. And finally, the youngest generation, Nadia and Elijah and Rainey: watching all three of you awake to the pleasures of language, music, and dance gives one hope for the future.

Introduction

A PECULIAR MUSIC

SONG REMAINS A SURPRISINGLY POWERFUL HORIZON OF ASPIRA- tion forpoets throughout the long nineteenth century. The thought of song persists as both question and challenge long after the post-classical divorce of poetry from music and the post-Renaissance spread of silent reading. That poets could ordinarily expect poetry’s song to be encountered through a printed text seems only to have increased the self-conscious probing of poetry’s songlike powers. Nineteenth-century poets returned again and again to the thought of song. This is most obvious in the proliferation of poems entitled Song, but it is equally evident in many other short lyrics adapting older popular or literary lyric forms once associated with song or actually sung, whether to traditional tunes or to music composed by professional musicians. It is also evident in the revival of interest in Renaissance and seventeenth-century poet songwriters from Shakespeare to Robert Herrick. The short, rhyming, stanzaic lyric poems recalling song composed by nineteenth-century poets, like those of their predecessors, sometimes stand alone and at other times interrupt, with their different sounds and rhythms, longer narrative or dramatic verse and prose. These were not poems written for musical performance, though some of them were set to music. They were, however, frequent sites for experiments with elaborate schemes of rhythm, rhyme, and other sound figures. It might, in fact, be better to think of them as lyrics demanding especially careful attention to voiced or silent reading, composed in knowing relation to the disparate uses of song in several popular and literary traditions.

This book explores the crucial importance of song as an aspirational model for post-Romantic nineteenth-century poets from Tennyson and Emily Brontë to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. These poets focused on verse texture, or prosody in the largest sense—rhythm and meter but also rhyme and other kinds of sound or sight semblance—as a site of poetry’s work, both performative and cognitive. In exploring the work of sound, sight, and touch in verse on poetry’s writers and readers, they turned repeatedly to song for models. Writing as conscious successors to Romantic poets in English (and the lyric poets of the English Renaissance and seventeenth century), they also drew extensively on Greek, Italian, and French lyric poetry. In their songs they explored not only the ballad or common measure stanzas of Anglo-Scottish tradition but also carols, ballades, sonnets, sestinas, canzoni, and other lyric song forms in multiple languages, both literary and popular. They exploited the possibilities of metrical and stanzaic arrangement, of phonemic repetition (including rhyme, assonance, and alliteration), and of word repetitions and refrains to achieve in their poetry what were received as songlike textures and rhythms. Poets who invoked song as figure or form invited readers to consider not only a long history of different kinds of song but also song’s similarities to any poetry that moves through rhythm and rhyme. Their song poems demand that we experience for ourselves how thought can be set in motion by the sound, touch, and sight of a poem, taking us beyond what we think we know.

In imitating song’s forms and sound textures, these poets invoke song’s thought in a double sense. My title refers both to ideas about song and to song as a possible model for understanding how poems can be said to think. The poets in this study often ask readers to think of song not only as musical sound but also as social performance, drawing on song’s reputed powers and uses: to modify the ordinary experience of time or space; to influence feeling and even affect the physical natures of things; to bind persons to each other or to ideas, including ideas of the divine; to inscribe on the body and in memory not just words or notes but strong emotions and ideas distilled into a phrase. But their song poems also, implicitly, ask readers to think like song: to listen to the sound of a poem thinking. They seek to draw us into a mode of thinking associatively through the workings of verse, its sounds as well as sense.

What kind of thinking is this? Alexander Baumgarten argued in 1735 that philosophy and poetry both think, but differently: the motions of the mind in the former case we call reason; in the latter case, where the mind’s objects include sensations and emotions, we need a different epistemological science, he suggested, for which he proposed the term aesthetics (from the Greek for sensation).¹ While not everyone would agree with Baumgarten’s suggestion that there might be two modes of thinking, each capable of generating ideas, over the next century and a half the peculiar powers of music, poetry, and the visual arts to move minds engaged the attention of philosophers (beginning with Baumgarten, Kant, and Hegel), poets (in England, starting with the Romantics), critics (William Hazlitt, Arthur Hallam, and Walter Pater), and, increasingly, physiologists and psychologists working on the generation and perception of musical tones and visual imagery, in both Germany and England. It was the embodied mental process that interested them as much as the ideas generated; they were intrigued by potentially cognizing motions of the mind other than discursive reasoning (cognitive: literally, knowing with, including recognizing but also perhaps conceptualizing, forming new ideas, a more difficult claim for what poetry’s ways of relating words and what they denote or connote might be doing). Music and poetry were frequently taken as parallel test cases for investigating the mechanisms by which meaning could be created or apprehended by the mind that was over and above paraphrasable content or other than that reached through reasoning. Today the question of thinking in the arts, including poetry, attracts renewed attention from a number of poet-critics, philosophers, and cognitive scientists armed with a far more sophisticated understanding of the neurophysiology of the brain.²

This study argues that there is much to be learned from poets of the nineteenth century, who turned to song to understand what they too held to be other ways that the mind, and poems, might move. For many of these poets, as we shall see, thinking like song was at once an immensely promising and a potentially risky experiment. Pursuing the reputed powers of song to charm, enchant, transport, or transform, contra the dictates of reason or common sense, might mean ceding, at least temporarily, the willed or intended controls of reason on the individual mind so central to Victorian ethics and politics, and in the end to many poets as well.³ Poems calling themselves songs, representing song, or aspiring to think like song are nonetheless a significant part of the history of nineteenth-century poetry and its poetics.

Poetry’s is indeed a peculiar music, as Charlotte Brontë wrote of her sister Emily’s strange lyrics.⁴ While poetry has sound contours of its own, to speak of poetry as song is necessarily figurative. Both lyric poems and musical songs combine words with a musical element, but while poetry shares song’s rhythmic entrainment, it does not participate in its system of tonal melodies and harmonies. In lyric poetry, language can be stretched or pushed toward song, Rob Kaufman writes, in a thought-experience that maintains the form of conceptual thought—and even the rigor and complexity of conceptual intellection—without being beholden to extant, status-quo concepts and their contents.⁵ In a semblance-character vital to the possibility of critical agency, he continues, "[poetic] speech can appear as song and song can legitimately seem to be logical purposeful speech-act. Simon Jarvis suggests that poetry, taking on the semblance of music, produces the feeling of thinking."⁶

But how? The analogy can usefully prod us to consider how both poetry and music, while precisely not logical purposeful speech-act[s], might produce the forms, the semblance, or the feeling, of thought. Charles Rosen, writing on music, argues that while musical elements alone do not constitute a language with fixed meanings, particular relationships among those elements can generate affective and cognitive significance. "What is perceived in listening is not merely noise, but relationships, regularity of beat, rubato, symmetry, repetition, dissonance and release, and so on—and we take pleasure in all this just as a lover of poetry, without naming the devices, takes pleasure in rhyme, assonance, and sound play—and this ends by giving us access to the meaning. What we perceive, consciously or unconsciously, is pattern, an ordering of sound."⁷ Such arrangements, he continues, become meaningful in the context of historical style; particular musical gestures constitute an expressive vocabulary at a given time and place, as Rosen has beautifully shown for music in a series of studies of classical and Romantic styles.⁸ Poems seem similarly to depend on the way particular prosodic practices are meaningful in specific historical contexts, as recent advocates for the study of historical poetics (Yopie Prins, Virgina Jackson) or for histories of verse style (Jarvis) remind us.⁹

The way an individual poet or poem manipulates sound relationships within or against a recognized historical style does seem to have an important role in poetry’s power to estrange language from overfamiliar meanings while reawakening us to what we did not know we knew. Pushing language toward song, the poem can also propel poets and readers alike, in an associative process that derives much of its motive power from sound patterning, to leap backward and forward across the sequential unfolding of a line on a page, the syntax of a sentence, an utterance in time, or the logic of deliberative reasoning, discovering novel semantic relationships that sound patterns suggest. Poets who dwell on these possibilities may follow the associative suggestions of rhythm and rhyme to cultivate states of trance, daydream, hypnagogy, or vision; to forge, as with song, a sense of community with others; to alter perceptions of space or time; and even, as Shelley hoped, to become the true legislators of the world, its philosopher-poets. Should such alogical, asyntactic procedures then be considered cognitively or conceptually generative? To follow sound patterns can also lead to banality or violence; whether through unconscious habit or by conscious editorial control, some of what sound suggests to the mind will be rejected. Peter McDonald argues that sound’s intentions must be more often resisted than followed, in what he sees as a continuing struggle between the facts of language, the memory of other rhymes, and the composing will of the poet.¹⁰ But to impose those controls too soon may also be to prevent the possibility of the surprising insight, the adventurous supposition, the imagination of what is not, or not yet. A strong sense that poetry, like music, is cognitively generative by means other, or perhaps more, than merely discursive reason has and continues to inspire not only poets but also musicians, artists, philosophers, and scientists who study the brain.

To follow a poem’s thinking in this sense demands that we listen for what, in an essay on the Rossettis, Angela Leighton has called its undersong of sound (adopting a phrase John Hollander uses): a shape in the ear, a sound-work or rhythm that propels a poem beyond its manifest thought-content.¹¹

For Hollander poetry’s undersongs have technical specificity. Usually plural, they may be thought of, he writes, as antithetical fables: in the sound- and rhythm-scape of the poem we hear the schemata of verse structure (accentual-syllabic or ‘free’) interacting with the sounds of speech, including those the written language cannot directly capture (tone, speech rhythm, the cadences of phrasal and clausal structure).¹² Not that the sounds of poetry mimic speech, but that they register the pressure of speech sounds, on the one hand, and, on the other, the different rhythm and sound possibilities offered by poetic forms. Hollander’s undersongs are poetry haunted not only by a poem’s own sound patterns (the poet, like the reader, listening back to hear the expectant pull of sound that meter, rhyme, and repetition will fulfill) but also by the sounds of other poems—and, I would add, of songs: specific kinds of musical song and sometimes the rhythm of a particular tune.

Leighton argues that a poem’s undersong—its sounded patterning of language and thought—contributes more to the cognitive work of a poem than we usually acknowledge. Is the beyond to which the shape in the ear, sound-work, or rhythm of verse can take us to be understood as poetry’s affective charge or its imaginative reach? Both, as we shall see, have been proposed by poets and critics drawn by the idea that thinking in verse or paint or song is either a different kind of thinking altogether or, perhaps more radically, simply the nature of all thinking in a healthy state, despite the self-descriptions of modern science and philosophy (and, some would argue, the requirements of modern life under capitalism). Leighton suggests that to listen for a poem’s undersong in its temporal unfolding may be to listen for what James Longenbach calls the sound of thinking in poetry—not the sound of finished thought.¹³ Such thinking-through-sound is always (like hearing, or reading) a temporal experience, a thinking in time (506). The impersonality of the phrase—the sound of thinking in poetry—further suggests that it is poetry itself, not the poet or reader, that seems to think. Both are important insights. To suggest that poetry thinks like song, while acknowledging the differences between the media, asks us to attend to the multiple sound relationships that bring words together in unexpected ways, making language, like thought, move differently. To attend to poetry’s undersong is to explore the semblance (Kaufman), sound (Longenbach), or feeling (Jarvis) of conceptual thinking without being beholden to extant, status-quo concepts and their contents.

The song poems of the Romantic poets and their later nineteenth-century successors ask for this attention to the strangely generative power of poetry’s sound movements and sound textures. They demand performative embodiment even when silently read: when to choose a metrical over a syntactic or lexical accent; how long to dwell on a stressed syllable or to pause between words or lines; how much weight to accord to the connections revealed by extra-syntactic patterns of rhyme, alliteration, and assonance; how variations in tempo, phrasing, pitch (inflection), and dynamics (softness and loudness) may affect meaning—all decisions that must be made in reading because they cannot be prescribed or recorded by a printed text. These are questions that may arise with any poetry, but in song poems scenes of listening and singing often introduce these lyrics or feature prominently in them, as if to encourage the reader to listen to the (silent) sound of reading and consider the delicate, shifting relations between thinking and verbal embodiment in the event of a poem. This process, which does not depend on any one voicing from the text, is what Isobel Armstrong describes as the collaboration between poem and reader in the real-time experience of reading a poem.¹⁴ Poetry invokes the idea of song as it draws attention to the moving sounds of poetry—to its wholly verbal music.

Poetry’s peculiar music may seem most obviously rhythmic. Pater, insisting that each art’s sensuous material produced its own aesthetic effects, singled out the rhythmic handling of language as the site of poetry’s distinctive beauty in his 1877 essay The School of Giorgione. It was through its rhythmic handling of language that poetry, he argued, aspired to fuse subject matter and sensuous form so fully that poetry approached the law, principle, or condition of music. Meter indeed matters immensely to poets writing in the nineteenth century, as a number of excellent studies of Romantic and Victorian metrical debates and practices have recently shown.¹⁵ Joseph Phelan traces a nineteenth-century tradition he calls musical prosody in which observing a structural analogy between poetic meter and musical measures opens up for poets new expressive possibilities, particularly, Phelan suggests, in the mimesis of thought’s variable motions. Metrical experiments driven by this understanding of poetry’s music are characterized by an effort to align the poetic foot (or sometimes, a two-foot unit) with the musical measure by observing the principle of isochrony (equal temporal intervals). Reading isochronously can also help give rhymed iambic tetrameter (a common base measure in song poetry) the lilt or swing of sung or chanted verse (though such imitations of musical performance Phelan tends to dismiss). For Victorians, meter, musically influenced or not, remained poetry’s medium. From one perspective, the rhythmic control it allowed poets to exercise, as Matthew Campbell has argued, can be linked to central Victorian conceptions of the willed self; from another, as Meredith Martin argues, the regulation of meter becomes one of the powers and responsibilities of the state. It aroused surprisingly passionate, widespread public discussion in which competing, ideologically laden schema for ordering and measuring language cut up into verse were endowed with significant national and educational consequence.

But nineteenth-century poets’ aspirations to song are not limited to their metrical practices. The poets on whom I shall focus explore a much broader range of sound patterning in the rhythmic handling of language—melodies, rather than melody, in Simon Jarvis’s useful term—for what it can reveal about the nature of poetic thinking.¹⁶ Rhyme, alliteration, and assonance are at least as prominent as meter in their experiments, as are other levels of rhythmic organization smaller or greater than the metrical line. Such alternative rhythmic and phonemic sound patterns, contributing importantly to the perception of rhythm in both metrical and nonmetrical verse, will be a primary focus in my discussions of the role played by prosody or verse practice in thinking of and like song.¹⁷

As it figures in the mythopoetic imaginations and poetic practices of nineteenth-century poets and critics, song is not the relatively limited lyric that modernism loved to hate—an overflow of emotion presumptively the poet’s own (Wordsworth, without his qualifiers) or the feeling confessing itself to itself in solitude that establishes an indirect intimacy with the readers who overhear it (J. S. Mill).¹⁸ Nor is it clichés of popular feeling forced into the straitjacket of thumpingly regular metrical verse (though there were certainly mediocre songs and verses of that description). Song differs too from M. H. Abrams’s greater romantic lyric enacting solitary meditation in the first person, often in Miltonic blank verse.¹⁹ The poets’ persistent fascination with song attests to a more generous and varied conception of lyric than that to which we are accustomed: experimenting with lyric forms that are social and performative as well as private and confessional, and exploiting song’s iterative and multi-personal or collective character to imagine its philosophical or religious or political work in the world. You might say that this book is a speculative effort to take seriously Swinburne’s hyperbolic claims for lyric poetry more generally as song. If those claims have for so long seemed eccentric or merely metaphorical, perhaps it is because we begin from a narrower sense of what lyric is and does. Recovering nineteenth-century modes of thinking song in its multiple relations to the world and to poetry (and to poetry mediated through painting, as I shall do in chapters 4 and 7) is one place to begin both a historical and a formal recovery of what lyric was, and might become.

In this chapter, however, I want to look more closely at several different ways of understanding the thought work of a poem that may clarify what is distinctive about nineteenth-century poets’ interest in the thought of song. While poetry continues to converse with song in this century, recent poetry written under the aegis of song often appears to have relatively little in common either with musical song or with the forms or sounds of nineteenth-century lyric poems. Indeed, the particular sound textures of nineteenth-century poetry have irritated many twentieth-century and later poets, who have rejected the mellifluousness and repetitive, incantatory rhythms they found in their nineteenth-century predecessors, preferring poetry that takes its rhythmic organization from the sound of (usually conversational) speech or works through the resistance of inharmonious language and disorienting reference in a way that aims to sever poetry from personal voice. Yet these differences can belie a shared interest in the larger question: how might the idea of song help us understand how poetry can be said to think?

I begin with the challenge to nineteenth-century ideas of poetry as song posed by the poetry and criticism of J. H. Prynne. Prynne’s poetry is full of references to song and to poetry’s song forms, from the early Day Light Songs (1968) to Kazoo Dreamboats (2011)—the latter a morning hymn, song at evening echo, and, in the poem’s last words, this song.²⁰ Yet the title of this later work suggests a paradox that the difficult text will exacerbate: the kazoo can be a most unmusical noisemaker, even though dreamboats recalls the lyrical, melodic dream work so dear, as we shall see, to Shelley, Keats, and early Tennyson, which inspired nineteenth-century successors.²¹ The suggestion that poetry is song, though consonant with a strong sense of phrasal rhythm, especially in Prynne’s earlier poetry, in Kazoo Dreamboats meets resistance in the syntactically difficult, lexically unexpected, and referentially complex character of long lines that have ceased to be verse, where deictics, pronouns, and reference cues point the reader constantly to prose discourses and situations that the reader can only access with difficulty.²² Perhaps this poetry, as Gerald Bruns suggests, might be said to share the structure of complex polyphony, or better, as Connie Lu argues, atonality, its conceptual music a tuneless discordia concors constructed from multiple arenas of language.²³ But any verbal harmonies must be wrought by readers from considerable dissonance at both the semantic and, often, the aural and haptic levels: this not-song, as Lu calls it, refuses expectations of mellifluence. It does not sound like song in any nineteenth-century sense.

Prynne has written of poetry’s work as a difficult struggle of composing or reading with the recalcitrant material of language, whose imprecisions and slacknesses, halts and suspensions, risk a dangerous, if sometimes necessary, implication in more than verbal violence.²⁴ Whatever kind of song this is, it does not flow in melodic numbers in Kazoo Dreamboats, which is in this sense hardly lyrical; indeed, by Prynne’s own definitions, it reaches toward epic (as the subtitle indicates: On What There Is), aspiring to perform a difficult thought-work that would start from knowledge of the universe considered as a whole and from there look back to embrace an astonishing range of particulars, not the other way around.²⁵ (No Marvellian worlds in a drop of dew.) Such thought-work in poetry, informed with the ontological concerns of philosophy, demands attention to semantic content achieved despite the recalcitrance of language, requiring the expulsion of lyric sounds and a lyric subject, wrestled into forms that may be no longer metrical, or rhymed, or even lineated. Such forms are perhaps meant mostly for the mind, or the mind’s eye. Uncommon terms, puzzling verse (or non-verse) arrangements, reference cues, and even the phonological histories of particular words are there as aids to conceptual thinking.

Composing poetry is, however, for Prynne grounded in the material and social real by the hard labor demanded by any attempt to order movement in a resistant medium—in which character, he suggests, a philosophic poetry becomes a kind of work song, coordinating the rhythms of minds and bodies in acts of physical as well as mental transformation.