Prins, Yopie. Voice Inverse.
Why do we assume that Victorian poems are transcriptions of the “voice” of a speaker, the speech of a unified psychological entity? This question lies at the center of Prins’s essay on “voice” in verse—or, more accurately, “voice inverse,” since Prins holds that the voice of poetry is not a transcription of utterance, but rather a metaphor constructed by the impersonal mechanism of meter. Prins responds to a tendancy in Victorian poetics scholarship to mistake the metaphor of “voice” in verse for the representation of literal human voices. This line of argument is typified by Griffiths who—even as he challenges the univocality of poetic “voice”—holds on to “an account of writing as the voice of an absent person” (45). This, Prins holds, betrays a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the human; theorizing Victorian poetics as a transcription of speech is an insertion of “the human in the places—or poems—where it is least certain” (46). Prins suggests combatting the anthropocentrism of this “lyric humanism” through a return to what she calls “historical prosody.” She recommends reading meter as “marks of culture, not limited to the expression of a speaking subject” (54). For Prins, meter is an historically-contingent graphic pattern, not a transcription of a transhistorical human voice capturing the interiority of a speaker.
In this article, Prins offers an important but familiar warning: the “voice” of printed poetry (or prose) is not an inscription of the utterance of singular subjectivity. For Prins, this “voice in verse” is a construction of the impersonal technology of meter. So, what does such a warning mean for work on reading literature aloud? Does accepting Prins’s critique of work on poetic voice prohibit inquiries into voiced literature and the aural experience of poetry? Catherine Robson—with her analyses of the “life cycles” of recited poetry—seems a compelling and perhaps unexpected interlocutor here. For while Prins sees meter as historically-specific “graphic forms,” Robson sees meter as influenced by the memorization and recitation practices of a poem’s readers. By focusing on reader response and not authorial intent, Robson introduces a thoroughly historicized approach to meter as literally voiced and informed by voice without assuming that voice in verse captures the interiority of an author’s or speaker’s hallucinatory subjectivity.