Description
Book SynopsisIn his Essay of 1815, Wordsworth asserts that ‘a pure and refined scheme of harmony’ must prevail in all ‘higher poetry’. This idea of a structured and complex form of ‘harmony’ was similarly noted earlier in
The Prelude (1805), where Wordsworth famously claimed that the human mind is ‘framed even like the breath / And harmony of music’.
Musical Wordsworth presents an original understanding of Wordsworthian harmony by examining an organised but dynamic sense of musicality that shapes his poetic theory and practice. This book is the first study to draw on music psychology and aesthetics to interpret the function and mechanism of Wordsworth’s aural structure and movement. Engaging with scholarship from the fields of literature and music, it defines Wordsworth’s poetry and the imagination through musical conceptions, and establishes various modes and forms of poetic listening as experiences of musical performance and appreciation. Each chapter explores a pair of musical abstractions – Lyricism and Musicality; Breath and Harmony; Repetition and Resonance; Expectation and Surprise; Rhythm and Dynamics; Rest and Silence.
Musical Wordsworth will be of interest to students and researchers of Romantic poetry, long nineteenth-century literature, and music.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘That voice of unpretending harmony’
1. Lyricism and Musicality
2. Breath and Harmony: Nature and the Romantic Imagination
3. Repetition and Resonance: The Soundscape of Memory
4. Expectation and Surprise: From Disorientation to Sublime Breakthrough
5. Rhythm and Dynamics: Listening to Urban Poetics
6. Rest and Silence: Voices of Collective Memorialisation
Coda: ‘The music in my heart’
