Aeolian Resonance: Acousmatic Sound and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination

Abstract

This dissertation investigates two ubiquitous poetic tropes of nineteenth-century poetry: the Aeolian harp and the poetic songbird. It approaches these tropes by way of sound, specifically, acousmatic sound, which is a concept introduced by musique concrète and denotes sound emanating from an unknown or unseen source. Scholarship in Romanticism has long accepted the Aeolian harp and the poetic songbird as foundational metaphors of the era, yet tends not to consider these tropes in relation to music and sound, nor has it attended to the sheer quantity of Aeolian harp poems, directing its interest to a few canonical examples. The originality of this dissertation is twofold. First, it brings to light several dozen Aeolian harp poems published between 1748 and 1888 and therefore expands the historical boundaries of Romantic writing. Second, it uses this archive of highly formulaic poetry to show how the tropes of harp and songbird function as clichés and thereby offers a new perspective on Romantic poetry. Chapter one reads trends across this poetry, in context with theories of the acousmatic discussed in Brian Kane’s Sound Unseen (2014), and Michel Chion’s Guide to Sound Objects (1983); it argues that the poems attempt to erase sound’s origins, mimicking the acousmatic sound of the actual harp and songbird. Subsequent chapters conduct specific case studies: Chapter Two focuses on a group of Aeolian harp poems written by and dedicated to poet Robert Bloomfield, taking into account Bloomfield’s career as a “peasant” poet, alongside his career as a maker of Aeolian harps to argue that the acousmatic music associated with the harp parallels the stereotypical ways that peasant and laboring-class poets were portrayed. Chapter Three examines Felicia Hemans’s poem “The Nightingale’s Death Song” (1829) and its musical settings by John Lodge Ellerton, C.Seemüller, and George Kingsley in addition to Letitia Landon’s “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans” and its setting by Alexander Roche; it tracks the iterations of the nightingale trope through sound, and its integral relation to Hemans as a poetess, in the years following her death in 1835. Chapter Four investigates the Victorian fascination with bird taxidermy, suggesting that this popular addition to homes and museums is integrally related to the poetic trope of the songbird. By setting canonical poetry such as Thomas Hardy’s “In a Museum,” “The Darkling Thrush,” Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” and Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” in this unlikely context, this chapter explores the “becoming visible” and “becoming mute” of conventionally invisible and audible inspiration. Overall, the purpose of this study is to recover a body of poetry either unknown or dismissed as unworthy of critical attention, devising a literary and cultural framework for the understanding of this work and the larger cultural phenomena in which it participated. It renews and shifts our understanding of discussed works by situating them in relation to these poetic clichés, rereading them with respect to contemporaneous and belated conceptions of sound, music, and ways of listening.