Abstract
In his aesthetic criticism, Coleridge divides the art of language into “poetry of the ear, or music; and poetry of the eye.” This distinction between eye and ear also involves the location of personhood in other people: the eye sees the face, which could be blank or angry and therefore unreliable or repugnant, and the ear hears the voice, which comes from within the other person and reverberates with breath and heart beat. Throughout Coleridge’s writings, gazing and listening—faces and voices—alternate. Particularly in his efforts to understand women as persons, Coleridge makes a significant aesthetic and ethical transition when he shifts from seeing women to hearing them.1 He consciously learns to listen when he tells Thelwall, “I am an immense favorite, for I pun, conundrumize, listen and dance” (Feb. 6, 1797; CL 1, 308). By underlining the word “listen” he points to the peculiarity of his doing so and to his deliberate intention to cultivate that skill. He listens to women’s voices in their poems and in their singing, and comes to associate music with women.
When the Soul seeks to hear; when all is hush’d
And the Heart listens!
PW # 129, ll. 25–26
“The trick of that voice I do remember well”
King Lear 4, 6, 105
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Notes
SWF 1, 358. This is the movement from “Behold!” to “Listen!” to apply the later 1805 formulation in Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” and to anticipate John Hollanders division of poetry in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Jonathan Ree, I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses—A Philosophical History (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 1999), p. 61. Ree quotes Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, 401: “‘It is primarily through the voice that people make known their inwardness, for they put into it what they are.’” The voice objectifies subjectivity (p. 60). I thank Professor Elisabeth Gitter for this reference.
Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (New York: Random House, 1988).
Betsy Bolton, Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage, pp. 30–39, 45–48, describes the focus on Georgiana’s sexuality as a way of undermining her intelligence.
Duncan Wu, ed., Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), p. 176, ll. 93–96.
For authenticating emotion by means of quotations, see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 169.
Eric Griffith, The Printed Voice in Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 95–96.
Matthew Campbell, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5.
Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 98. Chapter 4, “The Theater,” initiates the interest in theatricality and melodrama in recent writing on the Romantic period. See her earlier “Romantic Theater,” The Wordsworth Circle 14 (1983), pp. 255–263.
Julie Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 117–122; 29. For more on the large new field of women and theater see also
Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donking, eds., Women and Playwrighting in Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and
Catherine Burroughs, ed. Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Coleridge also praises the actress “Miss Hudson” to Lord Byron, noting particularly her skill in balancing the metrical line with natural rhythms of speech (CL 4, 599); from a skilled metrist, this praise is supreme.
Iain McCalman, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) has done a great service to the field in enumerating these divas.
Susan Levin, “The Gipsy is a Jewess: Hariett Abrams and Theatrical Romanticism,” in Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley, eds., Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1995), pp. 236–251 and notes 312–314.
Rachel Cowgill, Paula Gillett, and Simon McVeigh, Music entries in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (New York: Oxford University, Press, 1990), pp. 34, 20, 39. See Elisabeth Bronfen, “‘Lasciatemi Morir’: Representations of the Diva’s Swan Song,” MLQ 53, 4.
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mysteries of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), pp. 42–43, 183–184.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music,” Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 2, writes that performances such as those of Beethoven “supply consumers with prestige and even with emotions that they do not themselves possess but to which their nature cannot remain immune.”
Amanda Eubanks Winkler, “Madness and the Prophetic Voice: Musical Prognostication on the Late Seventeenth-Century English Stage” (delivered at NEASECS conference 2002), cites a well-known song by Henry Purcell, “Beneath a poplar’s shadow” (1702), where the diva sings “I swell … and am bigger, I swell….,” with trilling between words. Coleridge tells his interlocutors (July 6, 1833), “I like Beethoven and Mozart…. And I love Purcell” (TT 2, 244).
To use part of the title of Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
For a close analysis of how technique reflects consciousness, see Marshall Brown, “Mozart and After: The Revolution in Musical Consciousness,” in Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 138–155; Brown describes Mozart’s “new way of thinking or, yet, of dreaming in musical forms, a mood of intense self-absorption that is favored even in the operas” (p. 153).
In the version of the poem printed in the Morning Post, Sept. 24, 1799, three additional stanzas of irregular length turn this accomplished music toward political activism, marching together “with trump and timbrel clang, and popular shout, / To celebrate the shame and absolute rout,” perhaps, E. H. Coleridge conjectures, at the battle of Novi over Napoleon’s troops led by Joubert. See Ernest Hartley Coleridge, ed., The Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 324–325.
Graham Davidson, “Coleridge in Malta: Figures in a Landscape,” Coleridge Bulletin 19 NS (Spring, 2002), 84–85.
J. Robert Barth, S. J., Coleridge and the Power of Love (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1988), pp. 91–97; “Whatever else it is, the ‘Letter to Sara is a poem about love and its loss” (p. 94); “‘Dejection’ … becomes a love power in a broader and deeper sense—not merely the lament of a frustrated lover but an ode to the power of love itself” (p. 97).
Michael John Kooy, “The Clerisy and Aesthetic Education,” in Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 178–179.
Paul H. Fry, “The Wedding Guest in ‘Dejection,’” in The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 175 and 178.
Edward Kessler, Coleridge’s Metaphors of Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 24 and 50.
Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 138; for revisions from Letter to Ode, see pp. 150–154.
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© 2005 Anya Taylor
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Taylor, A. (2005). Hearkening to the Voices of Women. In: Erotic Coleridge. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979179_7
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