Performing the Pure Voice: Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London

British and American modernist poets shared a preoccupation with the importance of speech to poetry—and conversely, of poetry to speech. As T. S. Eliot put it in “Little Gidding”: “our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe.” ¹He approximates Dante’s terza rima in the Divine Comedyto describe an encounter with the shade of a past master—perhaps W. B. Yeats, or Dante himself—who underscores this ideal of the poet’s relationship to the spoken language. For Eliot, then, the poet expands the expressive capacity of common speech; like Dante in the Divine Comedy,he writes in the “middle style” to purify the “vernacular” of the day. ²Ezra Pound, in his first prose work, The Spirit of Romance(1910), paid careful attention to Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia,in which Dante affirms poetry written in the common speech. As Pound would later attempt in the Cantos,Dante imagines poets creating an ideal version of the vernacular, borrowing elements from different regional dialects to create a precise and concise language. ³Yeats, in the decades preceding both Pound’s and Eliot’s migrations to London, had similarly sought to rid poetic language of abstraction and rhetoric in favor of the clarity and naturalness of “living speech” through experiments with Anglo-Irish dialect. ⁴He tried not to write dialect verse, but instead a poetry that sounded as natural as the spoken word. ⁵And, across the ocean, William Carlos Williams pursued a poetry free of “poetic” language and European traditions—an American poetry based on the American spoken word: “It is in the newness of a live speech that the new line exists undiscovered.” ⁶

This article gives the orientation toward speech of modernist poetry, with its emphasis on the oral (as opposed to the visual), a social context. ⁷I will turn to the sociology of culture to examine the important social role of elocution teaching and the verse-recitation movement in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Following Pierre Bourdieu, who characterizes the aesthetic disposition of the contemporary French cultural elite (those who affirm the autonomy of the aesthetic) as that of the “pure gaze,” ⁸I will suggest that the culturally legitimating marker of distinction in middle- and upper-class London before World War I was, indeed, the “pure voice.” This context helps elucidate modernist critical and aesthetic categories like those that preoccupied Eliot in his early criticism—the purity of language, impersonality, and verse drama—and historicizes their role in the public emergence of modernist poetry. Bourdieu suggests that “art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences” (D,6–7). I will argue that Victorian elocution and recitation practices, which initially served the clergy, barristers, M. P.’s, and other male members of the privileged classes who envisioned a career involving public speaking, evolved into a much more elaborate and widespread vehicle of cultural reproduction, legitimation, and distinction for the male andfemale upper andmiddle classes. The new elocution, with its emphasis on verse recitation, had its own institutions of consecration and professionalization, the support of a profitable corner of the publishing industry, and a growing presence in official pedagogy. The verse-recitation movement, which was both part of liberal-education reform trends and a response to class anxieties that were partially caused by those same reforms, privileged oral cultural production over visual spectacle, which it associated with artifice, theatricality, and—especially—the working-class music hall.

To open out this notion of pure voice and its role in modernist aesthetics, I will examine the nexus of modernist poetry and avant-guerreclass anxieties via a strange dual text—the copublication (as a single magazine) of Harold Monro’s The Poetry Review(1912), an important organ for the aesthetic innovations of both Georgian and modernist poets, ⁹and The Poetical Gazette,the journal of the aesthetically moribund and conservative Poetry Society. ¹⁰With this copublication and its successor, Poetry and Drama(1913–14), Harold...