Griffiths, Eric. The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry.
Griffiths picks up his consideration of the “printed voice” (a term adopted from Browning’s The Ring and the Book) at the juncture of two seemingly paradoxical observations: 1) written poetry is (among other things) a use of language that attends to the sound of words, and 2) writing can never unambiguously notate the sounds of language. Yet, for Griffiths, this problem is the point. For, it is precisely the “intonational ambiguities” (98), the proliferation of possible voicings in print, which open up, for a poet, opportunities for creative meaning making. Through the alternate voicings of these ambiguities, for example, Tennyson exhibits both verbal skill and the “breaking-points of voice” (98). In the love poetry of the Brownings and Hardy, the gap between spoken utterance and printed word serves as a metaphor for the gap between ideals and actualities in romantic love: “speech is to writing as romance is to marriage” (194). Even Hopkins’s fastidiously notated verse fails to assist readers in hearing the poem’s voice, instead making “explicit the constant neediness of the script” (262), a neediness central to the spiritual humility of his explicitly devotional poetics. In all cases, poetry is not a form impoverished by its inability to transcribe the speaking voice, but instead, a form enriched with the possibilities engendered by its “hints at voicing” (60).
Griffiths is a valuable interlocutor for me not because he considers Victorian practices of recitation and reading aloud, but rather because he explicitly and intentionally does not consider such practices. Like Stewart, Elfenbein, and Nowell Smith, Griffiths takes as his primary concern the “imagined voice” (13) of silent reading. Griffiths argues, in fact, that many poems (like Tennyson’s Maud) are best left unperformed, for the ambiguity in utterance corresponds to ambiguities central to the poem’s themes, like the uncertain extent and nature of the speaker’s madness. Yet I would add that, even so, a study of the printed voice in Victorian poetry cannot neglect the influence of the reciting voice of Victorian poetry. The popularity of poetic recitation was undeniably a catalyst for these authors’ creative use of the “poetic voice” (see Perkins). In my opinion, Griffiths—with his unabashedly biographical close readings and densely theoretical, trans-historical conceptualization of the “printed voice”—fails to adequately historicize what promises to be a study of the printed voice in Victorian poetry. While he briefly nods to the rise of print culture, mass literacy, and advent of new philosophies of self-consciousness (those of Kant and Hegel), he does not provide a thorough explanation of why the nineteenth-century is such an apt case study for his project. For it is no accident that Victorian poets attend so acutely to the gap between speech and writing, since they lived in a century preoccupied with capturing, representing, and recreating sound and speech.