Chapter 9 - Reading visions

Summary

The first part of this book explored how poems have to be produced aurally if we are to hear their voices. In this part we will consider some strategies for producing poems imaginatively – in the root sense of imaging – to experience their visions. If a poem is a script for hearing, it is also a script for seeing. While this is true for all poems, eighteenth-century poetry may present some special imaginative challenges for modern readers. Why so?

We might start with two qualities of much eighteenth-century poetry: an appetite for abstraction and a preference for imagistic restraint. Abstraction often takes the form of personification, what we would call the personification of abstract ideas. But that way of putting it may be something of a retrospective distortion, one that assumes a fully formed abstract concept exists first and is only then given a figurative personhood. The relation between conceiving and “picturing,” however, may well have been more reciprocal. The popularity of personification will require fuller attention in the next chapter, but here we can grasp the visual challenge it may present readers who lack the associations that were more common in the eighteenth century. We can see the distance between then and now very dramatically by looking to a nicely documented instance of eighteenth-century reader-response criticism of a passage from James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–46). These three lines from James Thomson’s Summer will not now strike most readers as visually rich, perhaps hardly visual at all:

1. O Vale of Bliss! O softly-swelling Hills!

2. On which the Power of Cultivation lies,

3. And joys to see the Wonders of his Toil.