›Silence‹ in Early Eighteenth-Century Poetry: Finch, Akenside, Collins

Summary

The exclusive notion of Romantic ›silence‹ has been questioned in the course of a more profound study of early eighteenth-century poetry. The interrelation between silence and the poetic genre of the eighteenth-century night-piece is most prominent in the works of Anne Finch, Mark Akenside, and William Collins. Yet, each of these poets uses a different technique to create (verbal) silence and to create landscapes as well as moodscapes that return and reflect lyrical subjectivity by means of devices such as personification, allegory and onomatopoeia. These night-pieces, while they promote a type of synaesthetic apprehension of the dark landscape, are, generally, anti-pictorial, private, and evocative rather than visually descriptive. It is the objective of the present essay to focus on the subtle techniques that the poets under discussion use to create silence. Also, it will be examined in how far the poets draw on the tradition of the night- or evening piece to compose a scene that is void of any human sound but which offers a blank for other sound devices to be heard.