Chapter 4 - Poetic Afterlives

Summary

Chapter Four turns to the phenomenon of spiritualist automatic writing in order to investigate the function of poetry in turn-of-the-century attitudes toward literary transmission. Spiritualist automatic writing revives and reconsiders the striking passage, fully realizing its model of other people’s language as a powerful muse. This chapter draws on a wide archive that places literary representations of automatism (including works by Browning and Kipling) alongside a large-scale late-Victorian experiment with poetic evidence: the Society for Psychical Research’s experiments with automatic writing, in which multiple mediums were enlisted to channel the fragmented communications of the dead. The product of a century’s worth of growing interest in the body as a machine that can involuntarily produce (and reproduce) language, spiritualist automatic writing practices allow us to see the degree to which tropes of automaticity and reproduction abut and often overlap with concerns about originality and creativity. Yet even more interesting is what they reveal about reception: they implicate bodily automatism in the pleasures of critical recognition.