Nowell Smith, David. On Voice in Poetry.
Nowell Smith begins his book with an admission of his own failure. Though he started this project with the intent to define “voice,” he found this task impossible. He does “not know what voice is” (4). This is, of course, what millenials would call a “humble brag,” for this admission is not really a failure but the fruit of his rigorously theoretical consideration of voice that takes into careful consideration the concerns of thinkers like Heidegger, Agamben, Derrida, and many other pillars of continental philosophy. Instead of defining the voice in poetry, Nowell Smith opts to “open up the concept” and explore voice as a “cluster of different conceptual valences” (1). He sees the voice, and the poetic voice more particularly, as “figural,” as a concept “thinkable only by being figured.” Poetry offers a plurality of configurations of voice, both figured as a variety of concepts (speechsound, persona, subjectivity, collective identity) and figured through prosodic and rhetorical devices (alliteration, prosopopeia, glossolalia, onomatopoeia). It is poetry’s vocality, he claims, that takes as its task the “animation of language” (11). Any attempt to study the poetic voice’s work of animation must attend not just to phonetic and semantic units on the page, but also the “higher-order contours, phrasings, [and] cadences” of poetic lines. In his five brief chapters (or essays, as he calls them), he traces philosophical speculations and poetic generations of the proliferating possibilities of how voice can be imagined: as a possible site for the origin of language through onomatopoetic imitation of nature; as Derridean differential vibration; as “polyphony predicated on future soundings” (78), on the “plurality of voicings” (104) constituted by rhetorical figures of address; and as a site for the continual remaking of collective subjectivity. His final chapter shifts in focus, arguing for a renewed notion of poetic “measure” that attends to the “plural contours and inflections, interpretative cues, choices, [and] double-binds” (145) that generate poetry’s polyphony.
Nowell Smith’s book could be renamed On Voice in Poetry and Philosophy, for, indeed, the major strength of his study is the dense theoretical and philosophical backing that informs his poetic readings of authors from Hopkins, to Baudelaire, to Shakespeare. His laudable attempt to converse with all considerations of voice, both literary and philosophical, at times leads him to perform some interpretive gymnastics, in which he contorts other scholars’ theories in order to exaggerate the novelty of his own. Much of Nowell Smith’s argument, for example, seems to parallel closely with Griffiths’s work on the “mute polyphony” of the printed voice. Nowell Smith—building on one quote in which Griffiths claims that readers “see rather than hear alternative possible voicings” (qtd. in Smith 77)—argues that Griffiths ignores how these voicings register in our “lungs, throat and mouth as well as the eye” (78). Yet of this Griffiths seems well aware, as he argues that the printed voice “fashions a newly reticulate body in the imagination of hits readers” (Griffiths 36). Similarly, Nowell Smith critiques Garrett Stewart’s commitment to the framework of phonemic and morphemic units in his theorization of transegmental drift and calls rather for an attention to “suprasegmentals or non-segmentals” (144). Yet I doubt that Stewart would argue that attending to the play of phonemes prohibits the suprasegmental analysis for which Nowell Smith advocates. Nor are the “higher-order contours” that Nowell Smith so struggles to describe completely detached from notions of phonemic and morphemic units. In short, Nowell Smith provides an excellent model of a theoretically-informed consideration of poetic voice that, while perhaps not saying anything radically new, does provide language that will prove helpful in articulating the work of voice in poetics.
