Introduction

Summary

The introduction considers the ways in which nineteenth-century thinkers conceived of the human body as one of the material media of poetry, investigating the often surprising intersections and overlaps between three infrequently related fields: studies of poetry, studies of media, and studies of the body. It is at these intersections that we can see the development of a nineteenth-century theory of poetry—“autopoetics”—deeply invested in automatic reproduction. The prefix “auto-” invokes a variety of meanings: “by hand” (i.e. by the body), automatically (i.e. mechanically), autonomously (by itself, independently). This is a poetics that depends upon evolving theories of physiology that established the embodied mind as a material medium. Equally importantly, this poetics develops alongside the media revolutions of the century—from the rise of mass print culture and its attendant silent reading practices to the development of telegraphy and phonography—which make increasingly obvious poetry’s mediatedness, its materiality, its reproducibility. Privileging automatic responsiveness over imaginative agency, the autopoetic tradition rewrites the muse as material language.