This chapter attends to the regular presence of grass in poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Walt Whitman and English war poetry to recent work by Oswald and Burnett, the poetry of grass works to articulate, obscure, and heal the marks of contemporary trauma. Grass also shapes the soundscapes and visual form of poetry to the extent that, as this chapter suggests, grass can be said to constitute the contemporary practice of composition itself. Like poetry, the green field works in and through trauma to find again new life after war and conquest, after personal loss. In its seemingly perpetual growing, grass finds in the poet new ways of making and responding.

This chapter argues that, throughout the 1870s, literary understandings of voice were transformed by, and also helped to shape, acoustic technologies and sciences. Developments in physics and physiology, and the invention of the telephone and the phonograph at the decade’s end, offered new ways of describing how the human voice was formed, transmitted, and heard. However, these developments also reimagined voice as something not exclusively human, continuous with a wide spectrum of inarticulate and non-human sounds. This dehumanisation threatened to undermine established definitions of literary voice, but literary and scientific writers also identified similarities between their respective theorisations of speech and sound, and ‘voice’ became a keyword that was frequently used to examine the wider relations between science and literature. After discussing George Eliot’s views on the possible implications of new vocal technologies for prose fiction, the chapter turns to the sonnets of Emily Pfeiffer, which examine how scientific models of voice might complicate and reimagine poetry’s conventional status as the most essentially vocal of literary forms.

Chapter 6 examines the reconstruction of Rwanda’s music scene after the genocide. It considers how it opened up new possibilities for young urban Rwandans to transform their hearts and imagine new visions for themselves. Although young artists seemed to share an understanding that song could communicate ‘messages’ (abatumwa) not available in other modes of speech, they also understood there were limits to this. Far from being a space of ‘freedom’ or the ‘unofficial’, the local music scene was shot through with politics. Young artists were keenly aware that the power dynamics that shaped wider post-genocide social life equally shaped the kinds of music they were and were not allowed to make.

The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

Chapter 2 contests deeply entrenched assumptions about pastoral, arguing that the Eclogues do not evince nostalgia for a lost, idealized nature but nonetheless are deeply concerned with the nonhuman environment. The chapter shows that the local places so central to the Eclogues are networks and assemblages of human and nonhuman beings, and that the local dwelling valorized by the collection is dwelling as a part of a more-than-human community. The poetry figures this ecological dwelling through the trope of pastoral sympathy and through its focus on environmental sound. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Vergilian pastoral is best understood not as a representation of herdsmen’s songs but of entire bucolic soundscapes. The second part of the chapter considers the implications of this more-than-human acoustic world for our understanding of Vergil’s own poetry. It argues that nonhuman sound contributes to the sonic texture of Vergil’s language, identifying an acoustic ecopoetics in the Eclogues as Vergil manipulates his language to transmit and recreate nonhuman sound.

J. Blake Couey, in “Isaiah as Poetry,” begins with the basic fact that nearly all of the book is written as poetry and encourages readers to approach it as such. He surveys its erudite vocabulary, its creative use of sound, and its parallelism and larger strophic structures. He closes with an extended appreciation of the “imaginative worlds” evoked in the book through the use of imagery and metaphors. He observes of its poetic vision that “its scope is nearly boundless.”

This chapter examines Clare’s place among the poets in his own lifetime and more recently. The first section considers his appeal to recent and contemporary poets such as Heaney and Paulin. It argues that they have been inspired by Clare’s commitment to the local and provincial, especially his use of local vernacular, and also by his aesthetic of the uncouth and rebarbative, which also influenced Thomas. It goes on to explore how Clare’s close sensory attention to the natural world influenced Thomas, Longley, Oswald, and Jamie.  The second section argues that Clare’s poetry developed in conversation with his wide reading. It focuses on a number of examples, including Collins, Cowper, and Thomson. Reading these poets alongside and through Clare we see new features of their writing emerge, giving us a richer, more dynamic sense of eighteenth-century verse, and of Clare’s poetry.

This chapter outlines a novel, rigorous method for studying literary recordings, which can support a paradigm shift in the study of literature as performance. The method incorporates leading-edge, open-source digital tools for analyzing speech patterns in recordings, and an ethically grounded approach to analysis, with attention to the neuroscience of speech perception, implicit bias in listening, and relevant theories of sound studies and voice studies. It also includes an overview of our own work on poetry recordings and of related developments in digital voice studies, and speculates about future directions for this research.

This chapter examines the aesthetic and imaginative significance of sound play, taking for its case study the poems of George Oppen. The chapter proposes that poetic sound play offers poets a way to explore value, whether it be a single vowel's sound value, a poet's preoccupation with certain subject matters, or that poet's particular political commitments. Through close readings of poems from across Oppen's career, and especially of Oppen's assonance and alliteration, the chapter argues that sound play becomes a social allegory, registering political possibilities which, on occasion, go beyond the poems’ explicit representations of social life. The chapter also shows how, as each sonic value is born afresh in each new usage, this sound play extends beyond the single poem to multiple poems. In the case of Oppen, sound play's continual production of the new through recombination promises, even as it cannot achieve, a future beyond capitalist reproduction.

Touching down in a few of the many geographies of Black sound, this chapter pauses to listen in between the lines and forms of Black literary creation. Inclusive of readings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and others, this chapter examines the penetrating collusions of the sonic and/as the literary in order to briefly mark their interreliance and to consider the conditions and futures of blackness as improvisational practice.

This chapter considers the influence of emerging technologies of audio reproduction on literature. The phonograph, also called the gramophone, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison; in the form of Edison cylinders and the flat discs introduced by Emile Berliner in the 1890s, sound recording was rapidly popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Camlot traces the twofold nature of the literary engagements with sound recording: On the one hand, they “suggested a direct, unmediated experience of events from the past”; on the other, in drawing attention to the material limitations of this new technology, which “worked to shape the real-time sonic events it recorded,” these engagements “revealed how indebted our sense of reality is to mediating factors.”

The wordless, often unwritable sound of the vox confusa is usually contrasted with the verbal, writeable sound of the vox articulata. The former was held to be irrational and meaningless; the latter, rational and significant. This chapter will examine the role which the vox confusa played in Augustine’s thought. It will argue that, in his later works, we encounter a wild(er) Augustine who appears to be more willing than his earlier self to recognise and exploit the vox confusa in a theological context.

Is it possible to hear marvels? Despite its deep roots in Aristotelian thought, the marvellous, or meraviglia in Italian, was a highly contested subject in early modern literary circles. It is most often associated with Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), the poet who infamously declared that the aim of poetry was, above all else, to arouse wonder. The primacy of wonderment as an artistic aim did not, however, begin with Marino. Not only does the idea permeate criticism throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, particularly in the writings of Francesco Patrizi (1529–97), but it was by no means restricted to the art of poetry alone. This chapter focuses on the origins of meraviglia in the work of classical writers, its centrality to literary debates in the sixteenth century, and its reimagining in the poetry, painting, and sculpture of the early seventeenth century.

In 1772 Joseph Banks recorded observations on the Hebridean island of Staffa. His most striking ‘discovery’ was a sea cave resembling a cathedral. Banks claimed the cave was known by the name of the mythical Irish warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill, or Fingal, to use the variant made famous by Macpherson’s Ossian poems. The publication of Banks’s findings prompted a small industry of travel writing that combined lithic observations with minstrelsy and national history. In 1797 the French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond published his research on the topic, which suggested that the association with Ossian was the result of a misunderstanding: whereas the Gaelic for Fingal’s Cave would be ‘an-ua-fine’, the actual name was ‘an-ua-vine’, which translated as ‘melodious cave’. Far from settling the matter, Saint-Fond’s intervention only added to the mystique. In this chapter I argue that the cave’s fashionable status can be partly attributed to a series of re-soundings, by which printed texts and theatrical performances relayed aspects of on-site accounts to new readers and audiences. Where existing models of Romantic resonance have emphasized a correspondence between sound and thought, the fame of Fingal’s Cave emerges here as the result of almost mindless repetition.

This chapter identifies scenes of aural recognition in a number of nineteenth century texts from the 1810s and 1820s: recurrent scenes which involve a character, a narrator, or an autobiographical witness hearing something (a song, a melody, a sequence of words) which they believe they have heard at least once before. Although seemingly unimportant scenes, they are often ones which are pivotal to the plot, the development of character, or the instigation of a regime of feeling. Analysing examples of this scene in Scott’s Guy Mannering, a stage adaptation by Daniel Terry, short stories by John Galt, and a travel narrative by Reginald Heber, the chapter tracks the various ways in which hearing accrues significance as a mobile sense in the context of a newly mobile world of extreme travel and colonization.

This chapter explores the ways in which the five novels diverge in their representation of sounds. Chariton seems well aware of what can be achieved by briefly-sketched sound effects, but brief sketches are all we get: he does not suggest that the written word might find it hard to convey varieties of sound. Xenophon is apparently not concerned to communicate sound effects at all. Achilles Tatius offers elaborate rhetoric and sometimes striking imagery in compensation for the written word’s inability to render sound. Both Longus and Heliodorus push their readers (in different ways) to reflect on the problem of communicating sound, each offering a different solution. That of Heliodorus for the representation of sung poetry is a striking advance on anything in the earlier novels, apparently learning from (but also upstaging) Philostratus’ Heroicus.

Radio historians observe that Midwestern accents defined the sonic norms of broadcast speech in the United States, and that “BBC English” became a “supra-local accent” that transformed the speech patterns of a small group into an imperial standard. Does literary modernism follow the same model? This chapter takes up the theoretical writings around “broadcast modernism” to write a regionalist theory of poetic modernism in the US. I read backwards from Lorine Niedecker’s desire for “speech without practical locale,” to bring together Niedecker, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot as Midwestern modernists whose compositions on, about, and for the radio produced work on speech that tune us into regional differences against the modernist ideology of radio’s “voice from nowhere”: the ambition of acoustic engineering, corporate infrastructure, and presidential speech. Anticipating the myth of the “neutral” Midwestern media voice, these poets’ work reveals the provincialism in modernism’s cosmopolitan desires.