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Notes
INTRODUCTION. THE GLOBAL AESTHETICS OF POETIC VOICE
1. Diderot, Selected Writings, 106.
2. Pinkerton, Scottish Tragic Ballads, xvii.
3. For a much longer exposition on the fantasy of unmediated voices, see Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
4. Elizabeth D. Hervey makes a similar point in Ventriloquized Voices, 6.
5. Bronson, “Strange Relations,” 299.
6. See Zionkowski, Men’s Work. For other descriptions of the professionalization of authorship, see Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market; and Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740.
7. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 33.
8. For a recent consideration of what has been called the lyricization of poetry and its relationship to the Romantic lyric, see Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?” esp. 183.
9. See Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered, 10–11. According to Doody, Augustan poets saw themselves as “dashing and experimental,” not “musty,” “correct,” or “stiff” (10).
10. For a brief yet detailed description of Gray’s importance in the eighteenth century, see Patey, “ ‘Aesthetics’ and the Rise of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” 589.
11. See Tadié, Sterne’s Whimsical Theatres of Language, 8.
12. Tadié, 5. See also pages 1–47 for more on the conversational models of Sterne’s fiction.
13. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 269.
14. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 274–75. His use of the factish derives from the scholarship of Bruno Latour.
15. Crawford, Devolving English Literature.
16. This is the commonly known title of the poem, as it circulated in the late eighteenth century after its manuscript was discovered and published posthumously. It should probably more accurately be known as “Ode to a Friend, &c.,” the title William Collins scrawled atop his manuscript. See Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Lonsdale, 492–501.
17. The Works of William Collins, ed. Wendorf and Ryskamp, lines 45, 39, 53. Subsequent citations of this poem refer to this edition and are cited in the text by line number.
18. The Highlands Ode, Howard Weinbrot notes, is a poem about “the variously reconciling effects of the British imagination that does not need classical inspiration”; see Britannia’s Issue, 381. Collins adapted the ode by linking it to the local mythology of Scotland and, in the process, articulated how such adaptation energized Britain’s flagging imaginative power (Weinbrot, 381–85). Collins expressed fears about the decline of poetry, in a dream that he reported to school friends about climbing the “Tree of Poetry.” In the dream, after he climbed out on a limb, the limb could not support him and he fell to the ground. See Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry, 9. Wendorf reads this as an allegory of Collins’s own fears of poetic failure; I see it as also representative of Collins’s sense of dissatisfaction with the current state of poetry.
19. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 91. Stewart continues that “it makes little difference whether the artifact is real or a forgery: distressed genres are characterized by counterfeit materiality and an authentic nostalgia” (91). But, as I show later in this chapter, the way Collins “counterfeits materiality”—by juxtaposing representations of Scottish relics with oral traditions—makes a great deal of difference for the poem.
20. Ibid., 103.
21. Ibid., 105.
22. Ibid., 68. Stewart warns, however, that “there is no ‘natural’ ” in these genres, meaning there is no pure expression, no original authentic past that we can trace (38). Instead there are persistent attempts to recreate the natural as something absent but made available again through the power of writing.
23. Ibid., 122. Stewart makes this remark about English ballads, and I pair her idea with poetry, even though she does not explicitly link them.
24. John Home came to London in 1749 hoping to have David Garrick stage his play Agis, a Grecian allegory for the contemporary relationship between Scotland and England, after the Act of Union in 1707. For more on Home’s trip to London in 1749, see Henry Mackenzie’s An Account of the Life and Writings of John Home, Esq., 35.
25. Wendorf and Ryskamp, Works of William Collins, lines 3–4.
26. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, 30–32. See also Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.
27. McLane, 24, 32. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, esp. 265–73.
28. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 265.
29. In 1600 Edward Fairfax translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata as Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Jerusalem. His was the first English translation of this text, and it remained popular into the eighteenth century. For more, see Godfrey of Bulloigne, ed. Lea and Gang, 3–65.
30. Other scholars have made versions of this argument. Weinbrot warns, however, that this relationship begins as an asymmetrically authoritative one; throughout the ode, Collins informs Home what he “must do,” and the irony of this imperative is that Collins embodies the type of English authority that Home had just encountered while in London (382). Still, by the end of the poem both the speaker and Home have undergone a “Scottish-induced metamorphosis”: Home has been transformed from an observer of Highlands culture to a participant in it, which he then shares with the English speaker, who likewise has become “educated and imaginatively rejuvenated while telling Home about Scottish imaginative power” (383–84).
31. Evan Gottlieb argues that these layers of mediation defuse and neutralize oral voices that appear in print. See Feeling British, 137–41. Collins’s mediation, he suggests, means that the “original folk material will be disciplined and domesticated into a non-threatening literary form for the consumption of leisured readers” (141).
32. For an overview of these metaphors of voice, see Lesley Wheeler’s Voicing American Poetry, 1–3, 17–38.
33. See Connor, Dumbstruck; Bloom, Voice in Motion; Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller; Picker, Victorian Soundscapes; Prins, “Voice Inverse”; Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England; Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices; as well as the entire issue of New Literary History 32, 3 (Summer 2001), titled “Voice and the Human Experience.”
34. This renewed attention to aurality, speech, voice, and sound reproduction is especially felt in the study of poetry, which, as Susan Stewart notes, “is a form of verbal representation” that “even in its written form evokes aspects of aurality in production and reception”; Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 60. “Poetry,” Stewart says, “presents an image of the speaker in relation to a listener,” which then “begins the social work of making that relation intelligible through its own projected conditions of reception” (67).
35. Connor, 30, 3, 4.
36. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, ix.
37. Berry, Poetry and the Physical Voice, 196. Berry calls this the “physical voice” of poetry, which is intimately linked to the personal, even physiological, characteristics of the author. A related conception of voice comes from T. S. Eliot’s The Three Voices of Poetry, which allows that the poet can speak to himself, an audience, or as a character.
38. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, 5. Emphasis in original.
39. Brower, The Fields of Light, 19, 29. See Brower’s entire chapter “The Speaking Voice” for an excellent description of mid-twentieth-century notions of poetic voice.
40. Wimsatt, xv–xvi.
41. There is still a debate about the degree to which New Criticism separated authors and readers from the text. Perhaps the most famous formulation is Terry Eagleton’s assertion in Literary Theory that, “if the poem was really to become an object in itself, New Criticism had to sever it from both author and reader” (47). See also Jancovich, “The Southern New Critics,” and Mao, “The New Critics and the Text-Object.”
42. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 168.
43. Ong, Writing and Orality, 82, 131, 44. Ong argues that print “reinforces and transforms the effects of writing” (117).
44. See Derrida, “Speech and Phenomena” and other Essays on the Husserl’s Theory of Signs, as well as his Of Grammatology.
45. See in particular Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
46. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 347, 351, 350.
47. See Brathwaite, “The History of the Voice.” “Nation language,” Brathwaite says, “is a strategy [of the slave] … to retain his culture” (270). Brathwaite points out that the oral plays a large role in nation language because “oral literature is our oldest form of auriture” (267). “Auriture,” as I see it, is a term meant to combine the oral with literature and to recall Derrida’s idea of écriture. See also Glissant, Caribbean Discourses, 163–65, 182–88.
48. See, as one example, Landmark Essays in Voice and Writing, ed. Peter Elbow, especially his introduction, “About Voice and Writing.”
49. In Problems in General Linguistics, Émile Benveniste sees the self and the speaking subject as a product of the pronouns used in a language. Charles Hartmann (Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song) proposes that voice is “the physical medium of identification,” an “abstract idea of selfhood,” and the “vibration of air in a particular throat,” all of which are not “metaphorically juxtaposed” but interwoven (3). Voice is a “sentience or intentionality unfolding in time” (113), a consciousness constructed through relations to other voices, since “no fully recognized voice is ever single” (146) but is “born … in a matrix of other voices” (47).
50. Barthes asks, “Is it not the truth of the voice to be hallucinated?” (“Music, Voice, Language,” 272).
51. Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, 67, 13, 38, 61. “Printed voice,” as Griffiths defines it, is still limited in many ways, and my project seeks to improve upon this term. For example, he claims that “the reader must inform with a sense of the writer it [the voice] calls up—an ideal body, a plausible voice”; in other words, while Griffiths concedes that one can never recover (or even truly discover) an author’s voice, he still maintains that the physical voice of the author should inform the reader’s interpretation of a poem (60). The text, in this sense, is a series of “hints at voicing, whose centre in utterance lies outside itself, and also an achieved pattern on the page, salvaged from the evanescence of the air” (60). The printed poem too closely resembles a script for a performance that the reader must call into an existence, a performance without which the text seems to be incomplete. My position about printed voice differs from Griffiths’s at those moments when he underemphasizes print’s independence from actual speaking or singing voices. He argues, for instance, that “literature aspires to recreate in a sublimed atmosphere the conditions of speech” (36). I do not think it necessarily follows from his analysis that print aspires to actual speech or singing, so that one could characterize print as incomplete. Readers do not “deduce” a voice encoded or imprinted within the text. Instead, authors use particular textual techniques to construct the evocation of voice that readers imagine during the act of reading.
In ‘Difficulties of the Bardic Voice,” Donald Wesling offers a theory of voice similar to that of Griffiths when he argues that “silent reading must supply the voice on the basis of what is known about speaking and about style in writing” (71). Yet, Wesling’s comments show that for him voice is fundamentally commensurate with style in the way that style “preserves,” as he says, a writer’s voice (70).
52. See Zumthor, “The Text and the Voice” and Oral Poetry, esp. 97.
53. Zumthor, “The Text and the Voice,” 67, 71.
54. Sterne, The Audible Past, 2.
55. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 56, no. 199; 42, no. 125. Even as he suggested them, Bacon’s theories were being questioned in dramatic texts and in anatomical explorations. For more on this early modern debate, see Bloom, 73–79.
56. Bloom, 6, 9–10.
57. Ibid., 3, 16.
58. Della Porta qtd. in Connor, 5–6.
59. Morland, Tuba Stentoro-Phonica, An Instrument of Excellent Use. This instrument was in essence an early version of the megaphone, made first of glass, then brass, and eventually copper.
60. See Connor, 5, 199–200.
61. See, von Kempelen, Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung einer sprechenden Maschine. For more, see Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema, 31–35.
62. The advantages of his ear trumpet, Hooke noted, after presenting samples at the Royal Society, were that a “stronger sound was conveyed by it”; see Early Science at Oxford, vol. 11: 330–31.
63. See Gouk, “English Theories of Hearing in the Seventeenth Century,” esp. 145–47.
64. See Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, Founder of the Methodists, vol. 1: 108.
65. Sterne writes in The Audible Past that “attempts to represent sound visually were themselves artifacts of a larger process through which sound was isolated as a phenomenon and by means of which it would become an object of theoretical and practical knowledge in its own right” (42). Sterne dates this process to the mid-eighteenth century, though its origins may be even earlier.
66. Ascham qtd. in Woolf, “Hearing Renaissance England,” 120.
67. Ascham qtd. in Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 117.
68. Smith, 119. The lack of space between words in many medieval and early Renaissance texts makes evident this philosophy: the texts were meant to be read aloud without interruption, not perused silently in one’s room. See Elsky, Authorizing Words, 4.
69. As Smith describes it, “paper and ink as material entities stand in for muscles and air as material entities” (121); in essence, he says, these are interchangeable entities that would be brought into question in the eighteenth century.
70. Smith, 96–129. As Smith argues, however, in the seventeenth century print stood “at the farthest remove from the speaking body” (125). See also Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 10–12.
71. Hudson, “Constructing Oral Tradition,” 241.
72. See Fliegelman, Declaring Independence.
73. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, 39, 5.
74. Rath, How Early America Sounded, x.
75. Fox, 6, 258.
76. Hudson, “Constructing Oral Tradition,” 252.
77. McDowell, “Mediating Media Past and Present,” 246.
78. For more on these broad shifts, see Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon, chaps. 2 and 4, and esp. pp. 10–11, 57–58, 183–84.
79. McDowell, 246; emphasis in original.
80. Morganwg, Poems, Lyrical and Pastoral, vol. 2: 220.
81. McLane, Balladeering, 72. McLane calls this the “ascendancy of ethnographic authority.” This ascendancy entails that “what had been considered a deficit in the cultural politics of the 1760s and 1770s,” the “perceived reliance on merely oral tradition, merely living reciters,” had become by the nineteenth century “a criterion of ethno-poetic authority” (13).
82. Blackwell, An Enquiry in the Life and Writings of Homer, 103, 107–9; and Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, liv, lvii, lxi.
83. For representative works on historicism, medieval revivalism, and eighteenth-century antiquarianism, see Johnston, Enchanted Ground; Snyder, The Celtic Revival in English Literature, 1760–1800; Joseph Levine, Humanism and History, 190–213.
84. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 39, 71, 8.
85. Fenning, A New Grammar of the English Language (1771), and Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) are quoted in Hudson, Writing and European Thought, 1600–1830, 106, 108.
86. Harold Love writes that “oral delivery becomes … an act of scribal publication by dictation” (“Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England,” 99).
87. George, “Public Reading and Lyric Pleasure,” 388.
88. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 117.
89. Johnson’s Dictionary, 4–5.
90. For more on Johnson’s concerns about an impure English language, see Baucom, Out of Place, 26–29.
91. For more on stadial and climatological theories of cultural difference, see Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 176–233; and Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, esp. 1–22.
92. Novak, “Primitivism,” 465. See also Hudson, “Theories of Language” and Writing and European Thought, 119–42.
93. See Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 17. Ballaster asserts that the decisive period in orientalism was the early eighteenth century, when understandings of the East as similar or analogous to Europe gave way to the idea that the East was ineluctably different (24).
94. Joseph Trapp qtd. in Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660–1780, 112.
95. Percy, The Song of Solomon, Newly Translated from the Original Hebrew, xxxii–xxxiii.
96. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (ed. Harding), 112.
97. The Letters of William Jones, vol. 2: 716.
98. Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry, canto III, lines 14–15, 16, 17, 21.
99. Ibid., III.23, 28.
100. Kurasawa, The Ethnological Imagination, ix.
101. See Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man.
102. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. 3: 351.
103. Horace Walpole (to Horace Mann), in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. 24: 21 (July 10, 1774).
104. Marshall and Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment, 258; and Michael J. Franklin, “Sir William Jones, the Celtic Revival and the Oriental Renaissance,” 37.
105. William Shenstone qtd. in Ross, The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy, 7.
106. Trumpener, xi, xii.
107. Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, 3.
108. Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire. For many different views on the coalescence of Britain as a nation, see Colley, Britons; Lucas, England and Englishness; and Hugh Kearney, The British Isles.
109. Karen O’Brien, “Poetry and Political Thought,” 168–70.
110. Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, 18, 1.
111. Ibid., 85, 89.
CHAPTER 1. THOMAS GRAY, VIRTUAL AUTHORSHIP,
AND THE PERFORMED VOICE
1. McDowell, “Mediating Media Past and Present,” 233–34.
2. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 69–72.
3. See St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 11.
4. Zionkowski, Men’s Work, 170. For more on patronage, see Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800. For more on how shifts in the literary marketplace changed authorship, see Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson; Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740; and Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market. There are numerous books about this shift from an early modern to an Enlightenment sense of authorship. For a listing of more see, Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance, 13–17.
5. This separation of the text from the author has often been equated to childbirth, in which the text becomes an independent entity, alive in its own right. John Milton warned in Areopagitica (1644), his treatise on the printing press, that “books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl [vial] the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them” (4) (page citation from 1644 edition). James Kearney offers a slightly different sense of the relationship when he suggests that the Reformation English book was an “incarnate text” tethered, in an umbilical fashion, to its producer. See The Incarnate Text, 1–41.
6. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 54 and passim.
7. Rose, “The Author as Proprietor,” 75.
8. Cooper, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 78.
9. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Chapman, 731. On Gray’s retiring ambivalence to the literary marketplace, Linda Zionkowski writes in Men’s Work that Gray tried “to reclaim a cultural position for poets that would render them not marginal but central, not mercantile but heroic. And in so doing, he defined resistance to commerce, not participation in it, as the truly masculine stance for writers” (147). Suvir Kaul argues that Gray’s relation to arts and class is marked by “radical ambivalence” but that he can be seen as part of the shift from “gentleman-poet” to “man of letters” (Thomas Gray and Literary Authority, 9); for these moments of ambivalence, see 4–12, 157, 224. In addition to these sources, see William Levine, “ ‘Beyond the Limits of a Vulgar Fate’ ”; and especially Scott Hess, Authoring the Self, 109–13, in which Hess argues that the “Elegy” reflects “Gray’s ambivalent authorial identity and relationship to commercial print culture” (109).
10. I have borrowed the term “printed voice” from Eric Griffiths’s The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. Griffiths argues that the “provision of voices for lines of print has to be done with every text” and that this is fundamentally an “exercise of imagination” (7). As he points out, the “poet’s voice is not the voice of the person who is the poet” and the “voice is that which is decided in reading a text” (67). It is this act of “imaginative voicing” that turns readers into an audience (38).
11. Montagu, “Verses Address’d to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” www.nlx.com/collections/86 (accessed January 17, 2010).
12. Montagu always denied authoring the Verses. Regardless, the public consistently assumed that the poem was composed by her, no doubt because of the evident animosity between her and Pope. See Grundy, “Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace,” 108. James McLaverty has suggested that Pope orchestrated the publication of poetry against himself to legitimize his desire to compose a public response against his many detractors(“ ‘Of Which being publick the Publick Judge.’ ”
13. Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, 23.
14. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope.
15. Pope, “An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot,” lines 125–28.
16. Deutsch, 11.
17. See Deutsch, 11–39. For more on the ways Pope controlled his public representation, see Stephanson, The Yard of Wit, chap. 4; and Donaldson, “Concealing and Revealing.”
18. Swift, The Complete Poems.
19. The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, vol. 2: 372 (February 13, 1753). Hereafter cited in the text as Corr.
20. Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” vol. 4: 489.
21. Gray’s attempt to disassociate himself from the voices of the poem was not always successful, as one reaction from Leigh Hunt demonstrates. Hunt’s reading of the poem’s epitaph is as for Gray himself: “The epitaph is on the author … We suspect, that the ‘cross’d in love’ of the previous lines might very well apply to Gray. He had secret griefs of some kind, perhaps of disease, perhaps of sympathy with a good mother, and distress at having a bad father (for such, alas! was the case)” (Hunt, A Book for a Corner, 222).
22. Frank Ellis was the first to suggest that Gray’s revisions were an attempt to “depersonalize” the poem. These attempts have been ignored by critics, Ellis argues, who insist on using the “Elegy” to reconstruct his biography, a misinterpretation that Ellis calls the “biographical fallacy.” See Ellis, “Gray’s Elegy.”
23. See Guillory, Cultural Capital, 85–133. Guillory argues that the peasant poet of Gray’s poem (“mute, inglorious Milton”) is not silenced by death but by illiteracy, constraining literary production and poetic success (116). He claims that Gray’s “Elegy” represents the increasing importance of vernacular over classical literacy, which permits a complexly intertextual poem like the “Elegy” to become an indicator of “cultural capital” (101).
24. In Thomas Gray and Literary Authority, Kaul claims that Gray’s references to the “simple poor” and “unlettr’d muse” indicate that “what the Elegy really mourns … is that poetic practice uninflected by the logic of commodity is not possible” (127, 141–42). Scott Hess argues that authorship is constructed in the contest between the orality of the swain and the literacy of the author, understanding the epitaph as Gray’s attempt to control his audience’s reaction; Authoring the Self, 110–13.
25. Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, 113.
26. For more on the “birth,” see Robert Mack, Thomas Gray, 424. For more on the queerness of collaboration in the creation of printed texts, see Masten, Textual Intercourse, 4–7, 12–62. For queer readings of Gray’s poetry, see Hagstrum, “Gray’s Sensibility”; and Rousseau, “The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century.” George E. Haggerty offers Gray’s potential same-sex desire as a reason why he avoided public exposure, claiming “the physical expression and the public exposure are written into Gray’s poetry of feeling, where they tremble with the frustration that they must already imply” (“O lachrymarum fons,” 85). See also Haggerty, “ ‘The Voice of Nature’ in Gray’s Elegy.”
27. Austin, Chironomia; or, A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery, iv. Thanks to Danielle Bobker for bringing this work to my attention.
28. The prevalence of oratorical manuals showed that this movement toward speech was at least in part dependent on print. Print extended and enlivened rhetoric and public speech. Austin is in this movement since, as Ben McCorkle argues, print came to stand in as the “exemplary standard for oral delivery,” which included the “mechanical standardization of delivery” and differed from the audience-centered oratory of antiquity (35); see McCorkle, “Harbingers of the Printed Page.”
29. Austin, 528–29.
30. Ibid., 522.
31. Austin writes in Chironomia that he seeks “to produce a language of symbols so simple and so perfect as to render it possible with facility to represent every action of an orator throughout his speech, or of an actor throughout the whole drama, and to record them for posterity, and for repetition and practice” (274–75). His diagrams constitute a system for performing what begins as written text.
32. Burgh, The Art of Speaking, 29.
33. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, xii.
34. For more, see Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 26.
35. Jefferson, despite his aversion to public speaking—he never delivered the State of the Union Address in person while president, preferring to send a handwritten letter—seems to have been an avid student of elocution, concluding, for example, that oral recitation was unique to each human being and that “no two persons will accent the same passage alike.” He thought characteristics of voice, such as tone, were integral to a human’s personality and that a text sounded “an author’s sentiments or revealed his character” (qtd. in Fliegelman, 20).
36. Benjamin Franklin wrote this in a letter to Noah Webster. See “all these improvements backwards” (December 26, 1789), in Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings, 437–38.
37. Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech.
38. Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation, 6.
39. Ibid., 7. Emphasis in original.
40. Tedlock, “Toward an Oral Poetics,” 517.
41. Ibid., 515.
42. Fabian, “Keep Listening.”
43. Ibid., 90.
44. Ibid., 91, 89.
45. Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality, 46.
46. Ibid., 10. For a longer discussion of reading at the intersection of the formal and the ideological, see Kaul, Thomas Gray and Literary Authority, 1–15.
47. Zionkowski, 170. The shift toward a more professional model of authorship based on paying readers rather than patronage was expressed as a loss of status for authors in the wider culture. Zionkowski suggests that some authors, most notably Samuel Johnson, combated this loss by instituting a gender ideology that saw involvement in the commercial marketplace of print as a reassertion of masculinity and cultural authority (9–10).
48. Kaul, Thomas Gray and Literary Authority, 239.
49. See Genette, Paratexts, 1.
50. Gray composed “The Bard” in fits and starts. He wrote that after abandoning the poem for some time he found the impetus to complete it after seeing John Parry perform Welsh songs in 1757. For a detailed history of the poem and its composition, see Lonsdale, ed., Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, 177–83.
51. Gray, “Argument” in Poetic Commonplace Books and Manuscripts of Thomas Gray, 1716–1771, 932. The “Argument” was not published with the poem.
52. Gray felt that bards occupied a public office that was conferred and fully sanctioned by the reigning political authority. See Martin, Chronologie de la Vie et de L’Oeuvre de Thomas Gray, 186. Gray’s evidence derives from his research with medieval manuscripts that claim to describe accurately the role and function of medieval bards, for instance, that bards’ importance in the political structure is indicated by their being allowed to sit with kings and queens.
53. These details are included in Norton Nicholls’s “reminiscences” of Gray from 1805. See Gray, The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, vol. 3: 1290.
54. Eugene McCarthy writes that Gray’s “poetic voice was liberated” after he assumed the “voice of the poet/bard” (Thomas Gray, 229). Arthur Johnston claims in Thomas Gray and the Bard that “The Bard” shows Gray “swinging” toward a concept of the poet that was “as far removed as possible from the figure he had represented in his earlier poems,” and that through the Bard Gray was “speaking in character” (8–10). In The Poetry of Thomas Gray: Versions of the Self, Roger Lonsdale argues that Gray escaped from himself by imagining himself as a bard, which is an instance of “total self-projection” (16). In Britannia’s Issue, Howard Weinbrot considers “The Bard” to be Gray’s affirmative departure from the private inspiriting muse of earlier poems (like the “Sonnet on West”) in favor of the “public voice of nation” and of a poet who, like the bard, evokes a unified community (385, 397).
55. In Gray Agonistes, Robert F. Gleckner identifies the Bard as Gray, though he sees this identification as the terminus of Gray’s “Miltonic agon”—the culmination of Gray’s struggle with Milton’s continuous influence, which, for Gleckner, also marks the tragic end of Gray’s poetic career (90). His reading of the poem’s conclusion, where the Bard hurls himself off Mount Snowdon to his death, says it all: “The Bard enacts in his plunge the willful sinking of Gray himself into the depths of eternal night and silence from which [he] will never be repaired nor his voice speak, much less sing” (92). Likewise, Wallace Jackson argues that Gray petitions “[reflect] the poet’s uncertain claim to voice” and that “his own poetry is vocal to a few … or to none” (“Thomas Gray: Drowning in Human Voices?” 369).
56. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 6. English poets, Trumpener argues, tried to “impersonate” bardic voice and to “imitate bardic materials” without an understanding of their cultural situatedness or their historical significance (6). She claims that this “re-functioning” of the bard by English authors like Gray simply displays “the nominalism of imperialism in a new, aesthetic register” (33).
57. John Parry is best remembered now from Gray’s comments about him in his letters. Blind at birth, Parry was a practicing harpist throughout his life. His patrons were the family of Sir Watkin William Wynn. Parry edited and published some of the earliest collections of Welsh music, including British Harmony, Being a Collection of Antient Welsh Airs, The Traditional Remains of those Originally Sung By the Bards of Wales, carefully compiled and now first published with some additional Variations, by John Parry (London, 1781). For more information on his life, see Griffith, “Introduction” to Four Lessons for Harp or Harpsichord by John Parry, iv–vii; and Williams, John Parry (1710?–1782).
58. The reference to “this learned body” is ambiguous. While it seems likely from the context that “this body” refers to Gray’s body, it is also possible that “this body” could refer to the body of scholars at Cambridge, the audience of Parry’s performance, of which Gray was a member.
59. Gray wrote: “the thought, wch you applaud, in those lines, Loose his beard &c: is borrow’d from painting. Rafael in his Vision of Ezekiel (in the Duke of Orleans’ Collection) has given the air of head, wch I tried to express, To God the Father; or (if you have been at Parma) you may remember Moses breaking the Tables by the Parmeggiano, wch comes still nearer to my meaning” (Corr., 2: 476–77 [August 27, 1756]). He probably saw both of these art objects while touring Italy with Horace Walpole between 1739 and 1741. For more on this tour, see Robert Mack, Thomas Gray, 220–70.
60. Cowley, The English Writings of Abraham Cowley, vol. 2: 214.
61. Gray’s complete comment about Dodsley’s Collection is: “You know I was of the publishing side, and thought your reasons against it none … the still small voice of Poetry was not made to be heard in a crowd; yet Satire will be heard, for all her audience are by nature her friends” (Corr., 1: 296). Gray’s statement about poetry’s “still small voice” alludes to a passage from 1 Kings 19:12: “and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” See Holy Bible (King James Version), 321.
62. “The Bard,” in Thomas Gray and William Collins: Poetical Works, ed. Lonsdale, line 1. Hereafter cited parenthetically by line number. Most citations of Gray’s poetry are from this Lonsdale edition and are cited below as Poetical Works.
63. Gray’s verse evokes elements of Welsh prosody rather than replicating them exactly. See McCarthy, 194–201.
64. The term “double cadence” is Gray’s and is meant to suggest an affinity with a type of Welsh verse called Gorchest y Beirdh, which Gray translated as the “Excellent of the Bards” in his Poetic Commonplace Books (799). He observed in his commonplace book that Welsh compositions were “generally in stanzas regularly answering one another; & there is a conceal’d harmony, arising from the regular return of similar letters or syllables in the beginning or middle of a Verse, doubtless very pleasing to ears accustom’d to the Cadence of their Poetry & Language” (799). But Gray was partly mistaken in his use of Gorchest y Beirdh. As Arthur Johnston points out, this Welsh verse pattern was not formed until the fifteenth century, after the historical period in which “The Bard” is set (“Gray’s Use of the Gorchest y Beirdd in ‘The Bard,’ ” 335–38.
65. Gray felt that Welsh oral poetry was naturally melodic and thus enticing; at one point he wrote in his commonplace book that Welsh poems had “excellent Prosodia, & wch is perhaps the finest, that any Language affords, [and] were admirably contrived for assisting the memory. [T]hey were all adapted to Musick, every word being harmonious, the strongest and most expressive repeated in a beautiful manner” (Poetic Commonplace Books, 799).
66. Ibid.
67. Pennant, Tour in Wales.
68. Charnell-White, Bardic Circles, 46.
69. Richards, Wallography, 122. Richards does concede that the Welsh language is pure, because it was not “deflowr’d by the Mixture of any other Dialect” (121), so I suppose he considers it “pure” gibberish.
70. An anonymous travel writer qtd. in Michael Franklin, “The Colony Writes Back,” 13.
71. Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, vol. 4: 183.
72. In the 1768 edition of this poem, Gray added a footnote to the line “A Voice, as of the Cherub-Choir” that simply declared “Milton” (Poetical Works, 199). This understated, seemingly self-explanatory footnote says a great deal about the importance and familiarity of Milton’s “voice.” Next to “distant warblings” Gray included another footnote: “The succession of Poets after Milton’s time” (199).
73. See Garber, Quotation Marks, 13–15, 19. These quotation marks also appear in the fair copy of the poem which Gray penned into his commonplace book. He was careful that they appeared as well in the printed text.
74. For more, see de Grazia, “Sanctioning Voice,” 288. See also de Grazia’s article “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks.” According to Robert Bringhurst, movable type representing quotation marks was not even produced until the mid-sixteenth century, which was about a century after the introduction of printing to Europe; see The Elements of Typographic Style, version 2.5, 86. For a related study of quotation marks in poetry, see Gregory, Quotation and American Poetry.
75. De Grazia, “Sanctioning Voice,” 289. The discussion over using quotation marks to indicate who speaks parallels the contentious debate about copyright and intellectual property that went on in eighteenth-century print culture. For more on this, see Rose, Authors and Owners; and Saunders and Hunter, “Authorship and Copyright, and Lessons from the ‘Literatory.’ ”
76. This resistance to Gray’s use of unusual typographical techniques and meters reflects the general response to his Odes (the collection in which “The Bard” first appeared), which was at once enthusiastic and confused. “The Bard” was one of two poems collected in Odes, published in 1757. William Powell Jones gives a suitably complex assessment of the reading public’s reception of Odes when he says that, though the poems might not have been universally appreciated, they were widely read and bought; see Jones, “The Contemporary Reception of Gray’s Odes.”
77. Bickley, ed., The Diaries of Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie, vol. 1: 135. This anecdote might also suggest the particularly textual nature of Gray’s orality and its difference from actual oral performance.
78. See the anonymous review “Odes of Mr. Gray.” The importance of Spitalfields grew after French Huguenots settled there during the 1700s. With this influx of foreign labor, it was converted from open or cultivated fields into tenement housing for silk-weavers, a population that came to dominate the area. Scholars estimate that there were between forty and fifty thousand workers involved in the British silk trade in the early eighteenth century, mostly in London. For more, see Sheppard, London: A History, 129, 172, 230; Hibbert, London: The Biography of a City, 122; Inwood, A History of London, 332–33; and Richardson, London and Its People, 152.
79. Waller, 1700: Scenes from London Life, 271. Waller’s evidence consists of the records of the French Huguenots who made up most of the population of Spitalfields. She notes that they still spoke and wrote in French, or a combination of French and English that Frenchified English words: one silk-weaver, for example, wrote his address as “dans la rue Lyon Rouge, paroisse Stepney, Spitlefeilds hameau” (271). These populations were not fully assimilated until three or four generations had passed; see Waller, 274.
80. Gray claims, in a handwritten note in his personal copy of the Odes, that Welsh metrics convey a “wild spirit.” See Lonsdale, Poems, 188.
81. Gray selected this motto from Pindar’s Olympian Odes. For more information about Pindar’s odes and their role in Gray’s poetry, see Lonsdale, Poems, 157; and McCarthy, 167.
82. Gray provided detailed instructions about how the volume was to be constructed, how his poems were to be presented, and in what order they were to appear, further evidence that he remained interested in and involved with his printed works until the end of his life. He instructed his printers to place the three imitations near the end of the book, and he remarked to Walpole that Poems provided him with a sense of an ending, noting sardonically, “What has one to do, when turned of fifty, but really to think of finishing” (Corr., 3: 1018 [February 25, 1768]).
83. See William Powell Jones, Thomas Gray, Scholar, 102.
84. Although the evidence is not conclusive, it seems that Gray could not read Old Welsh or Old Norse, the languages of the original poems he was evoking; hence, he relied almost exclusively on the Latin translations. Most scholars agree, however, that Gray had some small knowledge of the two languages, particularly their rhythms, on which he capitalized when devising the metrical forms of his imitations and “The Bard.” For more, see Snyder, The Celtic Revival in English Literature, 1760–1800, 34; Starr and Hendrickson, eds., The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray; English, Latin and Greek, x; Kittredge, “Gray’s Knowledge of Old Norse,” xli–l; and William Powell Jones, Thomas Gray, Scholar, 98–99, 101.
85. For ideas about translation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, see Judith Sloman, Dryden: The Poetics of Translation.
86. Gray made this comment about adding notes to “The Bard” in particular. He claimed to be spiteful toward his readers because the material of the bards’ prophecy could be found in any “six-penny History of England” (Corr. 3: 1002 [February 1, 1768]).
87. In the overall “Advertisement” for the imitations, Gray explains that they were meant to be “some specimens of the Style that reigned in ancient times among the neighbouring nations … and … our Progenitors” (The Complete Poems, 33).
88. Poetical Works, 63. For complete information about “The Fatal Sisters,” see Lonsdale, ed., Poems, 210–13. The origin of “The Fatal Sisters,” first titled by Gray “The Song of the Valkyries,” was an Icelandic legend Davraðer Lioð from the eleventh century. Gray translated from Bartolin’s Antiquitatum Danicum de Causis Contemptae Mortis, a volume of Norse poems with Latin translations which was published in Copenhagen in 1689.
89. “The Fatal Sisters,” in Poetical Works, line 63.
90. Ibid., lines 57–60.
91. Kaul, Thomas Gray and Literary Authority, 241.
92. Millner, Thomas Gray’s Welsh and Norse Poetry, 80. In his discussion Millner refers particularly to contemporary reviews of Gray’s later poetry in Critical Review 25 (1768), 367; and in Monthly Review (May 1768), 408.
93. “The Triumphs of Owen,” in Poetical Works, line 1.
CHAPTER 2. WALES, PUBLIC POETRY, AND
THE POLITICS OF COLLECTIVE VOICE
1. “Eisteddfod” translates roughly as “sitting together”; in The Eisteddfod, Hywel Teifi Edwards further defines it as a meeting, a singing session of national songs (4). Thought to date from the twelfth century, these meetings were competitive from the beginning; later they tested and licensed performers in the metrical traditions of Wales (Edwards, 6–7). The last significant eisteddfod before the eighteenth century occurred in 1567, but its importance endured: similar yet much smaller gatherings were held sporadically, most often in pubs, until the early eighteenth century; see Edwards, “The Eisteddfod Poet,” 9. The first modern eisteddfod was organized in 1789, after which it evolved into the National Eisteddfod that continues annually.
2. The Cambro- Briton, vol. 3: 442.
3. Ibid., 3: 504.
4. Ibid., 1: 58.
5. See Hughes, “St. David’s Day,” 139.
6. As Shawna Lichtenwalner notes, oral festivals like the eisteddfod helped the Welsh “re-envision and codify a positive cultural identity that was historically based but modernized” (Claiming Cambria, 142 and throughout).
7. Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales, 81.
8. I have adopted the term “resistant nationalisms” from Janet Sorensen’s The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (24). She in turn developed her term from the work of David Lloyd and Paratha Chatterjee. For more on resistant nationalisms in the British Isles, see Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain; and Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism.
9. See Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the role between print and the formation of the nation as an “imagined community” in Imagined Communities, 1–37.
10. Morgan, “From a Death to a View,” 99. E. D. Evans notes that by the eighteenth century, “bardic learning, handed down by oral tradition, was waning but far from extinct” (A History of Wales, 235). For more on Wales in the eighteenth century, see Davies, A History of Wales.
11. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism.
12. Ibid., xi.
13. Ibid., xv.
14. Ibid., 6, 33.
15. Ibid., 6.
16. Ibid., 34.
17. The exact composition date of Evans’s “Paraphrase” is unknown. Sarah Prescott dates it from sometime between Gray’s initial publication in 1757 and 1765. For her rationale, see “ ‘Gray’s Pale Spectre,’ ” 89, fn. 45.
18. For more on the Cymmrodorion Society and other antiquarian societies, see Sarah Prescott’s Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales, chap. 1; and “ ‘What Foes more dang’rous than too strong Allies?’ ”; as well as the society’s website: www.cymmrodorion1751.org.uk/ (accessed February 3, 2010).
19. Psalm 137:2–6 tells that upon reaching Babylon the Jews “hanged our harps upon the willows.” When the Babylonians asked the Jews to entertain them with a song, they refused, reaffirming their faith and invoking dire outcomes should they sing to their captors or forget their homes in Jerusalem: “let my right hand forget her cunning … let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” The question the Jews ask themselves—“How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?”—is the same question Evans attempts to answer in his poem, on behalf of Welsh national authors.
20. Trumpener, 4.
21. Ibid., 4.
22. Lichtenwalner, 20.
23. Prescott, “ ‘Gray’s Pale Spectre,’ ” 80, 93.
24. “Proclamation for a Meeting of the Bards, At Midsummer, 1798.”
25. This translation appeared in W. Owen Pughe’s Palestine, a Poem by Heber, and The Bard, by Gray, Translated into Welsh, published in London in 1822. The review appeared in the Cambro- Briton 3: 307, 312.
26. OED, s.v. “transfusion.”
27. The first successful blood transfusion occurred in 1818, just a few years before this reviewer lauded Pughe’s poem. For a discussion of the transfusion supposed to have been provided for Pope Innocent VIII, see W. J. Bishop, The Early History of Surgery, 112–14.
28. Morganwg experimented with a number of bardic identities throughout his life before settling on “Iolo Morganwg,” a name by which he is still commonly known. See Charnell-White, Bardic Circles, 10. For more on Morganwg, see Jenkins, ed., A Rattleskull Genius; Constantine, The Truth Against the World; and Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 146–82. See also the website of “Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Tradition in Wales,” University of Wales, Aberystwyth, http://iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk/ (accessed December 19, 2009).
29. Iolo Morganwg [Edward Williams], Poems, Lyrical and Pastoral, vol. 2: 7. Both names—Edward Williams and Iolo Morganwg—appear on the title page of this collection, Morganwg’s own publication, perhaps demonstrating his dual readership.
30. Morganwg, 1: 7.
31. For more on the Enlightenment suggestion that oral traditional cultures were the state of nature, see Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, 113.
32. Morganwg qtd. in Charnell-White, The Truth against the World, 36, 68, 153.
33. Merians, Envisioning the Worst, 13–14.
34. The Gentleman’s Magazine LIX, part 2, 1789, 976–77. Morganwg, 2: 195. Although Morganwg claimed to detest Gray’s poem, he may have been the printer and publisher of Pughe’s Welsh translation of it. He was a printer, and the publisher of Pughe’s translation is listed on the title page as “E. Williams.”
35. Charnell-White, 38.
36. Ibid., 20.
37. Charnell-White notes that the gorsedd mixed a number of traditions, particularly from the eisteddfod, so that there was little practical difference between these occasions (121). These two models show that the societies and constituencies of Welsh bardism, while often overlapping, could also be in conflict as they struggled to determine regional identity.
38. Hutton, 159.
39. In a note appended to the title and to the conclusion of his poem “The Swain of the Mountains,” Morganwg describes the “specimen of the old national Manner of the Welsh in their poems” (Poems, Lyrical and Pastoral, 1: 92, 95).
40. Morganwg qtd. in Charnell-White, 38. As of 2009, there was a memorial to Morganwg and the gorsedd on Primrose Hill.
41. There is a description of this early gathering in The Morning Chronicle (September 26, 1792) and in Morganwg, Poems, Lyrical and Pastoral 2: 39. For more on the role of Celtic antiquarianism in Morganwg’s bardic revival, see Branwen Jarvis, “Iolo Morganwg and the Welsh Cultural Background.”
42. Edward Jones, Miscellany. Charnell-White claims that there is no corroborating evidence that this event happened (138). Nonetheless, the note gives a picture of how Morganwg’s performances may have been organized.
43. The Monthly Review of Literature; or magazine de savans (London: 1792–1793), 16.
44. Ibid., 17.
45. Edward Jones, Miscellany. This mixture of sources leads Charnell-White to conclude that, while literary primitivism may have provided Morganwg with a “ready-made framework,” he borrowed from non-Welsh traditions as well to fill in that frame (79).
46. Of course, it is possible as well that the idea of holding them “dear” is merely metaphorical.
47. A description of this meeting can be found in Cambro- Briton, 3: 504.
48. Reproduced in Wu, ed., Romantic Women Poets, 508–10 (lines 8, 24, 33–34). It was originally titled “Lines on the Eisteddfod of the Cymmrodorion.” The reaction to Hemans’s poem on its publication was strongly dismissive. One reviewer claimed it was “better left deposited in the archives of that foolish people” and that the eisteddfod was one of the “two greatest humbugs” in London at the time (Wu, 508, fn. 3).
49. Roach, Cities of the Dead, xiii.
50. Several critics have noted Hemans’s enormous sensitivity to how texts mediate specific sounds, voices, locales, and contexts. Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk characterize all of Hemans’s poetry as an “echoing intertextuality” (Felicia Hemans, 3). In “ ‘A Deeper and Richer Music,’ ” Diego Saglia extends this notion of sound and text, arguing that Hemans’s verse is a “complex interweaving of human and natural location … mediated by other texts and voices” (351). Rather than access “a world of absolute transcendental values,” Hemans’s textual voices are “situated within cultural and ideological contexts drawn from history or historically grounded literary and non-literary sources or connected with men and women in identifiable settings and situations” (352).
51. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, vol. 7: 182 (September 28, 1820).
52. Lootens, “Hemans at Home.”
53. For an excellent discussion of Hemans’s life, reputation, and critical heritage, see Susan Wolfson, Felicia Hemans, xii–xix. For more on Hemans and the eisteddfod, see Lichtenwalner, 148–60.
54. Cambro- Briton, 3: 61.
55. Aaron, “ ‘Saxon, Think not All is Won.’ ”
56. Hemans, Poems, England and Spain, Modern Greece, 73–74. See also Brewer, “Felicia Hemans, Byronic Cosmopolitanism and the Ancient Welsh Bards,” 173–74.
57. Hemans, Poems, 73–74, 76.
58. See the preamble to “The Rock of Cader Idris” in Wu, ed., Romanticism, 1247.
59. Trinder, Mrs. Hemans, 30.
60. Hemans, Tales and Historic Scenes, “Advertisement.” References to Hemans’s poems in A Selection of Welsh Melodies are from this edition and are cited by line number.
61. Lichtenwalner, 152.
62. See, for example, Sweet and Melnyk, Felicia Hemans, 3; Saglia, “ ‘A Deeper and Richer Music’ ”; and Rudy, “Hemans’s Passion.” The work of Paula Feldman, Tricia Lootens, and Susan Wolfson has also been significant in bringing Hemans back to our attention.
63. See Bogel, Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England.
64. For more on this connection between nationalism and the memorializing of the dead, see Schwyzer, 97–98.
65. Taussig, The Magic of the State, 4. Taussig qtd. in Schwyzer, 98.
66. Rhys Jones, Gorchestion Beirdd Cymru. The English translation of Jones’s preface is provided by Prys Morgan in “From Death to a View” (70).
CHAPTER 3. SCOTLAND AND THE INVENTION OF VOICE
1. Macpherson. Fragments of Ancient Poetry, a2. All references to the Fragments are to this edition; quotations are cited parenthetically in the text.
2. The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Toynbee and Whibley, vol. 2: 680.
3. See Gaskill, ed., The Reception of Macpherson’s Ossian in Europe. For a consideration of the effect of the Ossian myth on interest in “native” British traditions, see Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue.
4. For a description of assessments of Fragments, see Stafford, The Sublime Savage, 40–60, 79–80.
5. Johnson, The Major Works, ed. Greene, 637–38.
6. Performance, Janet Sorensen notes, was an essential part of this connective relationship, since “performing bodies were seen as facilitating the affective bond of spectators” among the wide variety of Scottish publics (“Varieties of Public Performance,” 134).
7. Adam Fox argues that, in the reciprocal relationship of orality and writing, the written word augments and reinvents the spoken word, “making it anew, propagating its contents, heightening its exposure, and ensuring its continued vitality” although in different forms. See Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, 5 and passim. See also Hudson, “Constructing Oral Tradition,” 240–55.
8. Here, I am borrowing from Eric Havelock, who suggests that ancient Greek oral poetry functioned as a “total technology of the preserved word” which maintained and transmitted culture across time (Preface to Plato, 43).
9. Fielding, Writing and Orality, 9.
10. Davis and McLane, “Oral and Public Poetry,” 125, 128. Davis and McLane even go so far as to suggest that Scotland was the first place to theorize orality, though, as I point out, Scottish authors were in conversation with and were developing techniques alongside English and Anglo-Welsh writers.
11. For more on the importance of songs and song culture in Scotland, see Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, esp. 1–9; and Davis, “At ‘san about’: Scottish Song and the Challenge to British Culture.” The publication of Scots songs, Davis notes, dates back to at least the 1680s. Many of these were “fake” or invented, creating a refreshing air of exoticism for primarily urban English consumers. Unlike English scholars and antiquarians, Scottish song-makers and collectors thought of songs as a “renewable resource” that involved “community activity” and the “interaction between oral and print sources” (Davis, 194).
12. There are numerous scholarly works that discuss the debate about the authenticity of the Ossian poems. For an excellent overview, see Howard Gaskill’s introduction to The Poems of Ossian and Related Works.
13. Ballad traditions, Donald Meek argues, were an important source of cultural creativity in Scotland and thus “enjoy[ed] a conspicuous place” of “respect.” Despite significant revisions between the medieval period and the eighteenth century, these ballads maintained their “intrinsic vitality.” Macpherson drew on this vitality as he devised a system by which to present the oral voices as printed text. See Meek, “The Gaelic Ballads of Scotland,” 20, 43.
14. Ephemerality, Johnson asserted, was to be expected from nonwritten learning; for him, “speech becomes embodied and permanent” through writing. To Johnson, human memory seemed so fallible that the recollection of ancient traditions would be impossible. After questing through Scotland for bards, he announced that it was hopeless “to find any traces of Highland learning. Nor are their primitive customs and ancient manner of life otherwise than very faintly and uncertainly remembered by the present race.” See Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (117, 114). For more on Johnson’s rejection of the existence of oral poetry, see Hudson, “Oral Tradition,” 161–76.
15. Johnson, Journey, 117.
16. Stone makes these claims in “Albin and the Daughter of Mey,” 15.
17. Also, Crawford, The Modern Poet,” 40; and Stone, 15.
18. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harding, 124–25.
19. Ibid., 113.
20. Macpherson, The Works of Ossian, vol. 1: 24.
21. Sinclair, The Poems of Ossian, xv.
22. The poems in Smith’s collection closely resemble Macpherson’s Ossian publications, and a collection of the ostensibly “original” Ossian poems was published by Smith, which included Gaelic poems with English explanatory notes. More interesting, perhaps, is Smith’s assertion that one of the state functions of the bard was to sing the clan chief to sleep at night (Smith, Sean Dana; le Oisian, Orran, Ulann &c. / Ancient Poems of Ossian, Orran, Ullin, &c. Collected in the Western Highlands and Isles; Being the Originals of the Translations Some Time Ago Published in the Gaelic Antiquities. Edinburgh, 1787), 162.
23. John Smith, 157, 12, 93.
24. Moore, ed., Ossian and Ossianism, vol. 2: 84.
25. Ibid., 2: 84.
26. Haywood, The Making of History, 79.
27. Moore, 2: 8.
28. According to Robert Lass, the history of the second person case is “intricate … not well understood” and “possibly incoherent,” but the prevailing thought is that in Middle English the second person included both “ye/you” and “thou”; the former suggested formality and the latter familiarity. By the end of the sixteenth century, “thou” and its possessives, “thee” and “thy,” were increasingly rare; and by the eighteenth century, “you was the only normal spoken form; thou … [was] restricted to high-register discourse,” even though it had once signified a “heightened emotional tone” or “intimacy.” See, Lass, The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 3: 148–53. See also Burnley, The History of the English Language, 200; Stevick, English and Its History, 140; and Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language, 201.
29. Moore, 2: 6.
30. Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English, 66–71.
31. It was common for authors and scholars to translate ancient poetry, especially oral poetry or folkloric genres, into unlineated prose.
32. Manning, “Ghost-Writing Tradition,” 92, 96.
33. Ibid., 99.
34. Connor, Dumbstruck, 3.
35. Ghosts come to represent this because Ossian’s world is meant to be a “preliterate, and therefore prehistorical, attempt to think about history” (Underwood, “Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife,” 238).
36. Meek, 28.
37. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 13. Roach’s argument about performance as re-performance is based in part on Richard Schechner’s description of performance as “twice-behaved behavior” or “restored behavior” (qtd. in Roach, 3). For a fuller discussion of the features of oral traditions in Macpherson, see Fitzgerald, “The Style of Ossian”; Stafford, 103–11; and Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques, 77.
38. Roach writes that “the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric” (2). This process, Roach notes, is inexact, and happens through trial and error.
39. Moore, 2: 14.
40. Macpherson, Works of Ossian, 2: 340, 349, 389.
41. Frances Sheridan’s reaction was recorded by James Boswell in his journal during his early years in London. See Boswell’s London Journal: 1762–1763, 182. See also an argument by Fiona Stafford in which she claims that reactions like these “belong to the ‘age of sensibility’ ” and demonstrate that the Ossian poems expertly elicited sentimentality from their readers (172).
42. Lamport, “Goethe, Ossian, and Werther,” 98.
43. For more on the notion of the heart in literature, see Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750; and Jager, Book of the Heart.
44. Vendler, Invisible Listeners, 3.
45. Recent studies of intimacy have addressed this split between public and more private forms of relationships. Niklas Luhmann argues in Love as Passion that modern companionate love modeled on passionate intensity between two people is a recent invention. Lauren Berlant, however, defines intimacy as “something [to be] shared”; in explaining the link between an individual and a collectivity, she emphasizes the bonds of common experiences (Intimacy, 281–83).
46. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 75.
47. Berlant, The Female Complaint, viii. While Berlant distinguishes intimate publics from counterpublics, she admits that they share features (7–8).
48. Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 3, 187.
49. For an excellent overview of Pinch’s argument, see Cottom, review of Strange Fits of Passion in Nineteenth-Century Literature.
50. John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England; and Irlam, Elations, 17 and passim.
51. The sensation of intimacy felt at a distance was familiar to those writing letters to loved ones, but the concept derived from Leopold Rosenmayr’s study of family life (Sociology in Austria), in which he explores how family members who do not reside together still feel effects that they describe as proximate intimacy.
52. Runciman, The Blind Ossian Singing and Accompanying Himself on the Harp. See Macdonald, Scottish Art, 70. This sketch was for a mural painted in 1772 which was destroyed by fire in 1899.
53. Potter, ed., The Poetry of Nature; Comprising a Selection of the Most Beautiful Apostrophes, Histories, Songs, Elegies, &c., from the Works of the Caledonian Bards. The Typographical Execution in a Style Entirely New, and Decorated with the Superb Ornaments of the Celebrated Caslon (London 1789). The English Review scathingly remarked that, despite the claims of newness in the title, its italic presentation was common to “elections” and to “canvasses of different kinds, and in the circular letter of tradesmen” (vol. 16 [1795], 263), that is, it was vulgar and common.
54. McGill, “The Duplicity of the Pen,” 42.
55. Zuk, ed., Bluestocking Feminism, vol. 3: 13.
56. DeLucia, “Far Other Times Are These,” 40, 43.
57. Ibid., 40. See also Potkay, “Virtue and Manners in Macpherson’s Poems of Os-sian,” 121, 125.
58. Pinch, 55.
59. For more on how the shift from oral delivery and manuscript to print-based culture changed notions of past and present, see Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
CHAPTER 4. IMPERSONATING NATIVE VOICES IN ANGLO-INDIAN POETRY
1. Alexander Dalrymple, an employee of the East India Company, enthusiastically called his company a “great Machine!” in “Fragment on the India Trade” (5).
2. For an extensive discussion of the process of recording and preserving ostensibly disappearing Indian traditions, see Ronald Inden, Imagining India.
3. Said, Orientalism. For an excellent overview of the many responses to Said’s Orientalism, see Cass, “Interrogating Orientalism,” 25–45. See also Macfie, Orientalism, esp. 181–326, 345–74.
4. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 21.
5. For a compelling synthesis of how orientalism advanced British economics, see Siraj Ahmed, “Orientalism and the Permanent Fix of War.”
6. Michael Franklin, “Sir William Jones, the Celtic Revival and the Oriental Renaissance,” 37.
7. For the best account of the need to read eighteenth-century poetry internationally, see Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, esp. 1–43. For an instance in regard to Augustan formal “expansiveness,” see Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse, 13–18.
8. See, for instance, Leask, “Towards an Anglo-Indian Poetry?”
9. Gibson, Indian Angles, 6–10.
10. Tara Ghoshal Wallace, challenging Edward Said’s sense that resistance to imperialism was small, argues that “popular and authoritative British writers from Alexander Pope to Walter Scott warn that imperial power poses grave social and moral dangers for the metropole” (Imperial Characters, 18). As Wallace notes in particular, India becomes an opportunity for contradictory political claims about Britain (141–42).
11. Here, of course, I am consciously adapting the language of “speaking back” typically associated with native colonized peoples to describe the position of Anglo-Indian authors. See, for example, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin.
12. See Linda Colley’s Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850, esp. 251. Other estimates place the number higher. The number of British civil servants in India is difficult to know, since it fluctuated. This number does not include other Europeans who resided there as independent merchants, traders, and mercenaries.
The relationship between the Mughal Empire, the East India Company, and the British government was complex, especially after the company took on a more governmental role beginning in the 1760s. Although the British East India Company technically acted as an administrative agent on behalf of the Mughal Empire, the company exerted out-sized influence because of its bribery and militarism. The British Parliament, anxious about the increasing power of the East India Company, added direct oversight beginning in the 1770s. Ultimately, the East India Company was removed entirely in favor of crown control of India, in 1857. For a short and lucid account of this complex relationship, see Rajat Kanta Ray, “Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818,” 513.
13. Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century,” 217. For an excellent comprehensive history of these years of colonialism in India, see Marshall, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century.
14. For more, see Steadman, “The Asiatick Society of Bengal.” The Asiatick Society, Steadman argues, could “hardly have existed without official recognition of the importance of native languages and literature for the effective government of the growing British empire in India and a conscious attempt to embody this recognition in permanent or semipermanent institutions” (469–70).
15. See The Letters of William Jones, vol. 2: 880 (January 23, 1791). Hereafter abbreviated LWJ and cited by volume and page number.
16. The Asiatick Society and the personal and literary relationships of scholars, more generally, were part of the “new institutions of sociality” that Mary Ellis Gibson argues were crucial to the literary culture and political economy of India (Indian Angles, 22).
17. Rocher, 228.
18. William Jones’s role in orientalism and British colonialism has been fiercely debated. Said suggests that Jones is an origin for European orientalists (Orientalism, 78). Garland Cannon argues that Jones does not fit into Said’s notion of orientalism because he appreciated Eastern culture; see Cannon and Brine, eds., Objects of Inquiry, 25–50. Michael Franklin, for his part, has pointed out that Jones appreciated Indian culture at a moment when many discounted its significance. Without denying Jones’s role in colonialism, Franklin considers Jones’s hymns an example of his “benign imperialism” (“Accessing India,” 64). In India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800, Kate Teltscher disagrees, instead describing the numerous ways in which Jones was complicit with and even extended British systems of colonialism in India by acquiring oriental knowledge (192–228). For more on William Jones generally, see also Franklin, Sir William Jones and Orientalist Jones; Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones; Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination; and Mukerjee, Sir William Jones.
19. LWJ, 2: 747 (August 12, 1787).
20. Franklin, Sir William Jones, 74.
21. LWJ, 2: 747 (August 9, 1787).
22. Franklin, Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 336. Thomas Percy suggested similar sentiments when he complained that “cold European imaginations” might find “somewhat extravagant” the images and metaphors of his Song of Solomon (xxxii–iii).
23. LWJ, 2: 714 (October 5, 1786.) There is a longer genealogy to this notion that goes back to early British orientalism in India. See Ahmed, 179–80.
24. LWJ, 2: 898 (October 19, 1791).
25. Jones felt the literature of Arabia and India to be a literature of “originals”; Ibid.: 716 (October 12, 1786).
26. Franklin, Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 326.
27. Ibid., 164; LWJ 2: 747.
28. Thomas Warton complained that Arabic poetry was “extravagant and romantic” and Edward Gibbon thought that Eastern authors lacked “the temperate dignity of style, the graceful proportions of art, the forms of visible and intellectual beauty”; see Marshall and Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, 73.
29. Jones, The Works of William Jones, ed. Shipley vol. 3: 547. In his written poetry, Jones tried to model this imitation of Sanskrit texts and popularize the study of the language. He was also involved in printing Sanskrit, publishing in 1792 the first Sanskrit text to appear in the Calcutta Gazette. For a discussion of Jones’s dual investment in imitating Eastern voices to create original innovations, see Zak Sitter, “William Jones, ‘Eastern’ Poetry, and the Problem of Imitation.”
30. Franklin, Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 361.
31. Often mistakenly received as translations, Jones’s “hymns” were published piecemeal in Britain after having circulated among the orientalist community in Calcutta. A draft of “Hymn to Camdeo” and the first stanza of “Hymn to Indra” were sent to Charles Wilkins (LWJ, 2: 624–25 [December 15, 1783]). As Jones began to compose his hymns, he appealed to his fellow orientalists, like Wilkins, to supply him with “some more of his names &c.” of entities in Hindu mythology (LWJ, 2: 669 [April 14, 1785]). These instances show that orientalism, while certainly a “textual attitude,” as Said argues in Orientalism (93–94), was also embedded in material circumstances that operated through conversation and the circulation of texts among specific individuals.
32. For an introduction to the history and structure of the Vedic tradition, see William K. Mahony, The Artful Universe, esp. 1–16. The particular attraction of Sanskrit for English poetry’s experiments with poetic voice might be best summed up in Mahony’s sense that the poet in the Vedic tradition hears “the primordial, divine Word sounding in the background of all existence” and then gives “voice to that Word in poetic songs ….” (12).
33. For a description of the Pindaric as arguably the most innovative genre of the eighteenth century, see Douglas Lane Patey, “ ‘Aesthetics’ and the Rise of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” 588–89. For more on changes to the hymn in the eighteenth century, see Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse, 75.
34. Franklin, Sir William Jones, 63.
35. Franklin, “Celtic Revival,” 30. Franklin suggests that Jones may have been more interested in socializing than reviving bardism, though his interest still shows Jones’s sensitivity to Welsh culture; see, Franklin, Orientalist Jones, 105–6.
36. Franklin argues that Jones, throughout his hymns, poses as a “Hindu poet.” These poems legitimize British rule, and thus, as Franklin says, the “objectives of the poet, Orientalist, lawyer, and patriot can be seen to coalesce” (Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 123). While my own readings have benefited enormously from Franklin’s research, I differ with him on how Jones presents himself in these hymns.
37. Franklin, Sir William Jones, 88; and LWJ, 2: 811 (September 19, 1788). For a discussion of the zamindar, see Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840, 127.
38. LWJ, 2: 783 (October 8, 1787).
39. Rajan, Under Western Eyes, 3.
40. Rajan, review of Tropicopolitans, 73. It is Jones’s attempt to serve as an intermediary among conflicting voices and traditions that leads Rajan to conclude that Jones was “perplexed.”
41. For more on the relationship between linguistic and cultural translation, see Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.”
42. Roy, Indian Traffic, 8.
43. Ibid., 18.
44. Performance culture, C. A. Bayly points out, was a significant avenue of commentary on British colonialism. Festivals, for example, served as an essential part of intra-Indian political communication, which linked widespread elements of the populace in the enjoyment of traditional culture. Such performances included recitations of songs, chants, prayers, and homilies, all of which promoted the exchange of knowledge. The media presented at these performances were complex; part written and part oral, they included heroic ballads of warrior culture, epics told by traveling storytellers, and social comedies. These “written media and their ‘shadow’ verbal forms,” at times performed by traditional Indian bards (bhats and charans), added up to multitudinous ways in which Indians used oral forms to share information, conduct debates, and offer critical comment. See Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, esp. 207–8.
45. For more on this historical shift toward what Maureen McLane calls the “ascendancy of ethnographic authority” in ballad collecting and other examinations of oral traditions, see Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, 72–75.
46. Alexander Pope, “An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot,” 602, line 128.
47. Jones makes this claim but does not explain exactly how his “variations,” as he calls them, are entirely new. See Franklin, Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 135.
48. For more on the performative history of the classical ode and its influence on English poetry, see Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode.
49. “Encomiums on Sir W. Jones,” 2.
50. Ibid., 3, 6.
51. Franklin, Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 168. Franklin retains Jones’s original stanza numbering, which includes the three part unit of the Pindaric: strophe, antistrophe, and epode. My numbering corresponds to stanza and line.
52. Ibid., 126. While it is not clear, I believe that the stanza structure of “Hymn to Gangá” is revised from Gray’s “The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode” as much as it is from “The Bard.”
53. Capell, Notes and Various Readings of Shakespeare, 72. For another instance of heptameter as an extensive elongated line, see Aaron Hill, Gideon; or, The Patriot, 60.
54. These efforts were not necessarily unselfish or unpolitical. Jones’s judgeship required him to operate within and therefore to understand Hindu and Muslim legal tenets. His willingness to do so played a role in the debate about how best to administer Britain’s Indian possessions, a debate which included members of the East India Company, the British Parliament, and native Indians. For more on the place of Jones’s legal studies in this debate, see Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 168–69.
55. Franklin, Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 124.
56. My position contrasts notably with those of other scholars of Jones and Indian orientalism. Franklin, for example, argues that in Jones’s writings he denies Indians the power to represent themselves but also blurs the difference between self and other (Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 8). Nandini Das suggests, in “ ‘[A] Place Among the Hindu Poets’: Orientalism and the Poetry of Sir William Jones (1746–1794),” that Jones brought the “alien space” of India within the familiar frame of European culture, which was an assertion of the “comprehensive and superior knowledge” of the European scholar (1245). Teltscher in India Inscribed discusses the “literary annexation” in which Indian materials are recast in light of European traditions (211).
57. Cannon, Life and Mind, 233.
58. LWJ, 2: 719.
59. Edmund Burke qtd. in Michael Franklin, “Accessing India,” 49.
60. LWJ, 2: 778.
61. For more on the use of Indian voices in the Hastings impeachment, see Teltscher, 177–79.
62. Irwin, “Bedukah, or the Self-Devoted. An Indian Pastoral.” This poem was published in London by J. Dodsley, the son of the well-known literary publisher. While it was written in India, it is unclear to me if it was also published there. Quotations from “Bedukah” are cited in the text by canto and line number.
63. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Irwin, Eyles.” Irwin spent most of his life in India, although many significant events, such as his marriage, occurred in Britain; and after leaving the company’s service, he retired to Bristol. He was stationed at Fort St. George in Madras (currently Chennai) and was an emissary to China in the 1790s.
64. The English called the custom suttee, an incorrect transcription of the Hindu word sati, meaning “good wife.” For examinations of sati see, Major, Pious Flames; Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality; Mani, Contentious Traditions; and Hawley, ed., Sati, The Blessing and the Curse.
65. East India Company recruits being educated at Calcutta’s Fort William College, for instance, were asked to debate in Hindi whether sati was “repugnant to natural feelings” or “inconsistent with moral duty” as a way to improve their language skills and familiarity with the country. See Rocher, 219.
66. McKeon, “The Pastoral Revolution,” 289. With his emphasis on place and space, McKeon talks about the pastoral as perhaps the most expert form of “discursive imperialism.” For additional information about the pastoral in foreign settings, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 95–99.
67. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, esp. 145–74.
68. The idea of the wife celebrating her choice to burn by singing until dead was a common feature of European accounts of sati. See Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 291. It was also a common feature of some Scandinavian poetry. See, for example, Thomas Percy’s “The Dying Ode of Regner Lodbrog.”
69. In Lycon’s account, sound is impressive; his description of hearing as a vibration and “trembling” is aligned with what were then the most advanced accounts of human hearing, which emphasized the ear as an organ of resonance upon which sounds impressed themselves. For more, see Gouk, “English Theories of Hearing in the Seventeenth Century.”
70. See Banerjee, Burning Women, esp. 173–210, where Banerjee discusses the idea of sati as “dying” to speak.
71. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 84.
72. Melting is an important metaphor for the emotional relationship among Bedukah, her listeners, and the English readers of the poem. For example, Irwin writes that, in response to her tales, her audience “melted of distress” (III.15). In another instance, the poem’s witness and narrator, Lycon, states, “[T]hro’ the crowd her melting accents steal” (III.1).
73. See Schürer, “The Impartial Spectator of Sati, 1757–1784,” in which he argues that one stance toward sati taken during this period was what he calls the “sentimental impartial spectator”—the Western onlooker who judged the meaning of sati in “moral and aesthetic” rather than “political” terms (22). Schürer is right to point us toward the importance of moral and aesthetic categories in the representation of sati. These categories, however, should not be considered apolitical. In fact, as this chapter shows, the aesthetic was mobilized in the service of evaluating colonialism’s politics.
74. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 98.
75. Ibid., 90.
76. Ibid., 101.
77. Ibid., 93. See also Spivak’s ambivalent elaboration of this concept in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 269–311.
78. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 309.
79. Leyden, The Poetical Remains of the Late Dr. John Leyden.
80. Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, 729.
81. For one account of these interracial relationships, see William Dalrymple’s White Mughals.
82. For Leask, Leyden’s “screen” of “fair” European women who shield the European man indicates that Rad’ha’s desire should be seen as “transgressive” (Leask, “Towards an Anglo-Indian Poetry?” 60).
83. Irwin, “Ramah: Or The Brahman.”
84. The final couplet of “The Bard” is: “He spoke, and headlong from the mountains height, / Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.” See Lonsdale, ed., Thomas Gray and William Collins: Poetical Works, lines 143–44.
85. Gibson, Indian Angles, 21–22.
86. Imperial expansion made many Britons feel that the nation was over extending its boundaries. The writer and critic Horace Walpole grimly joked, in a letter written in 1762, that Britons “were full as happy, when we were a peaceable quiet set of tradesfolks, as now [when] we … are overrunning East and West Indies” (The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. 22: 16). Playwright and member of Parliament Edmund Burke, who for much of his career worked against the East India Company, worried that “young men, (almost boys) govern there [India], without society and without sympathy with the natives,” their only goal, he grieved, being the “rapid accumulation of wealth” (qtd. in Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 32).
87. The Poetical Works of John Scott, Esq., 137–52.
88. See Bhabha, 121–25. Bhabha famously notes that the anglicizing of India created individuals who were “almost the same, but not quite” (122).
89. For two versions that expand on this argument about poetry ventriloquizing Indian voices and using those voices to obscure the violence of colonialism, see Das, “ ‘[A] Place Among the Hindu Poets’ ” and Teltscher, India Inscribed.
90. See Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology,” 106. Said, too, discusses deep structure, claiming that orientalism has “a kind of deep structure … able to multiply and proliferate in all kinds of ways.” He compares this deep structure to syntax, which can produce enormous variety “out of a very small number of elements.” See Goldberg and Quayson, eds., Relocating Postcolonialism, 4.
91. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” 226.
92. See Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 8–9. The “re-adaptation” that Viswanathan describes operates according to a “principle of complementarity,” with its “capacity for transference, in criss-cross fashion.” This complementing creates an “interactive dynamism” between the British and Indian traditions.
93. See Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance. The “arrival of Sanskrit texts in Europe,” Schwab argues, revived an “atmosphere” that connected parts of the globe that had been separate, effecting an enormous cultural shift in Europe, the likes of which had not been experienced since the Italian Renaissance (11).
94. Ibid., 15.
95. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture, 5.
96. Teltscher, 211.
97. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 274.
CODA: READING THE ARCHIVE OF THE INAUTHENTIC
1. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, 240.
2. Ibid., 241.
3. Bowles, Sonnets, with other Poems.
4. The island is also known as Belau.
5. Keate, An Account of the Pelew Islands. This account described the shipwreck of the British ship Antelope, interactions with the natives of Palau, and the ship’s return, carrying Lee Boo, to England.
6. Ibid., 26, 55.
7. The Interesting and Affecting History of Prince Lee Boo …, 8. This claims to be a compilation of Keate’s narrative.
8. Cottle, “Lee Boo. A Poem.”
9. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 308–9.
10. Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur,” 250–51.
11. That appropriation reduces opportunities for accurate self-expression by colonized peoples certainly seems to be demonstrated in the case of Bowles’s “Abba Thule,” a literary historical construction whose name we cannot even be sure of. For example, his name in Bowles’s poem is likely the English misinterpretation of the Palauan word “ibedúl,” meaning chieftain. (Josephs, New Palauan-English Dictionary, s.v. “ibedúl.”)
12. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 9, 6; emphasis added. Rather than “reifying a voice of resistance or dissent,” Aravamudan suggests, “the act of reading makes available the differing mechanisms of agency that traverse texts, contexts, and agents themselves” (14; emphasis in original).
13. Ibid., 9.
14. Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, xv.
15. Arondekar, “Without a Trace,” 21.
16. Ibid., 22.
17. Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 2, 3.
18. Ibid., 21.
19. Adela Pinch varies this theme by arguing that, in the eighteenth century, emotions were “transpersonal,” at times perceived as “autonomous entities … that wander extravagantly from one person to another” (Strange Fits of Passion, 3).
20. Kaul, “Provincials and Tropicopolitans,” 431.
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