Perkins, David. "How the Romantics Recited Poetry."
Through elocution manuals, rhetorics, and written accounts of hearing poets read, Perkins tries to recapture, as his title suggests, how “the Romantics recited poetry.” His project takes as a starting point the claim that poetry was simply more auditory for readers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Poetry was frequently read aloud, and even when it was read silently; the Romantics “heard it more in the ear of the mind; and they heard it differently” (656). Perkins builds on descriptions of Coleridge’s, Wordsworth’s, Keats’s and Byron’s recitation styles, observing that—despite differences in animation and voice—all chanted their poetry or, as Coleridge himself recommends, read “with a tone.” Reading blank verse posed challenges for the Romantics. Both Wordsworth and elocutionist Thomas Sheridan recommended following each line with a “pause of suspension,” or a brief hesitation before continuing onto the next line without a change in the voice or vocal tone. In short, the poetry of the Romantics was seen, to quote Hegel, as “essentially sounded” (qtd. in Perkins 656) and also far more musical than we are now likely to imagine.
Perkins’s piece is valuable more for its evidence than its argument. His “conclusions” are vague and rather inconclusive, probably because this was originally envisioned as part of a larger project. He claims that the style of recitation in the Romantic period was “in transition” and differed depending on the reader. This is not at all surprising. Yet his attention to the aural yields a bounty of anecdotes that help readers “hear” how authors like Wordsworth and Coleridge may have aurally imagined their own verses. For this reason, I think this article could be a helpful pedagogical tool. In my special interest area syllabus, “Lit Out Loud: Speaking and Hearing Literature from the Romantics to the Modernists,” I pair the essay with Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” Wordsworth’s “On the Power of Sound” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” I hope to encourage students to identify the interpretive ramifications of reading with a Romantic recitation style. Perkins’s approach also converses with work like Griffiths’s and Stewart’s, as Perkins reminds us that the sound of poetry—whether imagined or literally voiced—changes depending on trends in reading practices and styles. Different ways of voicing could open up more “intonational ambiguities,” as Griffiths calls them, and uncover more of Stewart’s drifts, elisions, and slippages—slippages perhaps less audible to readers who do not recite like the Romantics.