The Voice Prints of Poetry: Recorded Speech and the Listener’s Body in Victorian and Modernist Verse

Abstract

In The Poetry of Experience, Robert Langbaum places the dramatic monologue from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot at the heart of the “modern literary tradition,” describing it as a “poetry of sympathy” that engages the reader through feeling. In this dissertation, I argue that Langbaum’s formulation misses the importance of the reader’s body to the construction and dissemination of voice in poetry with dramatic qualities. In arguing for the primacy of the reader’s body, I draw on an extensive scholarship on sympathy and its relationship to technology, affect, embodiment, and gender in the six decades since Langbaum wrote. I focus in particular on the production and dissemination of voice in poems by Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, and several popular poems on the phonograph and the radio to demonstrate the significance of the body to recorded voices in verse and sound recordings from the early Victorian to high Modernist periods. My first chapter traces speakers’ relationships to both characters’ and readers’ bodies in individual poems by Tennyson and Browning. I argue that these poems rely on readers’ embodied reactions to their speakers to make their arguments. My second chapter focuses on the phonograph and phonograph poems (1888-1901). I argue that hearing recorded voices on the phonograph—the first ever sound recording and playback technology—caused auditors to conflate the human voice with the phonograph body, creating an entirely new type of speaker from those in printed poems. In my third chapter I examine how the intangibility and decorporealization of voices in early American radio and radio poems (1922-1945) offers speakers a new way of bonding with real and imagined listeners. My final chapter looks at T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and contrasts it with The Waste Land for iPad application (2011) to consider how Eliot generates empathy for female characters who have survived traumatic assaults as told by male speakers’ voices. Throughout, I discuss how these poems urge us to value the uniqueness and imperfections in speakers’ voices through our embodied reactions to them, on the page and also in mechanically reproduced forms.