Reading Voices: What Can We Learn from Modernist Poetry Recordings?

There’s something unsettling about listening to voices from the past. Uncanny, eerie, and sinister are all words listeners reach for to describe the experience of displaced voices reaching our ears from beyond the grave. But these recordings enchant as much as they unsettle: one glance at the effusive YouTube comments under the 1889 recording of Browning, or one of Yeats from the 1930s, speaks to their enduring allure.

Florence Farr with the psaltery she used to perform with Yeats

Part of this attraction could stem from how hearing voices seems to be a fundamental part of our experience of poetry. One common narrative of modernity, first formulated by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), sees society since the invention of the printing press as increasingly fixated on words lying silent on the page—the visual over the oral—though he somewhat ominously heralds the dawn of the electronic age as a time when the oral may return to its former prominence. Poetry’s own historical roots are in oral performance. Recent work in cognitive science would suggest these roots are not as distant as they seem, finding that even when we read silently, the parts of our brain stimulated by listening to sound are engaged; our “inner voice” may be more literal than figurative. After all, poetry is a type of language which deliberately exploits the sonic resources of words on the page, doing its work by playing off sonic coincidences and patterns even when no sound is physically produced. Listening to recordings or performances of poems can shape these silent readings, too. As the poet, performer, and critic Charles Bernstein puts it, hearing poets read their work can “change our hearing of their works on the page as well.”

Historical recordings can feel especially unsettling because of how audible they make the passing of time. Anyone who has listened to one of those Browning or Yeats recordings has probably been struck by their strangeness: the vast difference between nineteenth century and contemporary poetry reading styles. Similarly, T. S. Eliot’s poetry on the page can seem jarringly modern, but read aloud in his reedy, measured, and disconcertingly English cadences—Woolf described him in her diary as “talking so slow, that each word seems to have a special finish allotted it” (Diaries I, p. 218–19) —roots it firmly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Tuning in to these strange-sounding voices brings to light some unusual but far-reaching questions: What does it mean to sound “modern”? Whose are the voices that sound within our own heads when we read poetry? And how might listening to voices from the past shape them?

There have been drastic changes in how poetry sounds to readers over the last 150 years, troubling the illusion that reading silently can offer us access to the poem as it sounded to the writer. In the 1920s, Ford Maddox Ford reflected on his own particular childhood hell, which consisted of listening to Victorian luminaries like the Rosettis, Browning, and Tennyson—or as he calls them, “poets who made great noises”—recite poetry at his family home:

they held their heads at unnatural angles and appeared to be suffering the tortures of agonising souls. It was their voices that did that. They were doing what Tennyson calls, with admiration: “Mouthing out their hollow Os and As.”

And it went on and on—and on! A long, rolling stream of words no one would ever use, to endless monotonous, polysyllabic, unchanging rhythms, in which rhymes went unmeaningly by like the telegraph posts, every fifty yards, of a railway journey.

If you’ve attended a poetry reading recently, this earnestly dramatic and intensely rhythmic Victorian experience—often, in less esteemed circles, accompanied by vigorous hand and arm gestures– will most likely seem foreign. You’re probably more familiar with something often referred to as “Poet Voice,” a much more neutral or monotonous style of delivery which Marit Macarthur has defined as characterized by:

(1) the repetition of a falling cadence within a narrow range of pitch; (2) a flattened affect that suppresses idiosyncratic expression of subject matter in favor of a restrained, earnest tone; and (3) the subordination of conventional intonation patterns dictated by syntax, and of the poetic effects of line length and line breaks, to the prevailing cadence and a slow, steady pace.

But the first half of the twentieth century, the earliest poetic period to have anything like a significant audio archive and the crucible for most modern poetry, doesn’t seem to have a recitation style so familiar as to be easily pinned down and satirized (by anyone without Dylan Thomas’s comic genius, that is). An era of poetry usually associated with the rise of silent reading and elaborate artisan printing presses, we tend to forget that poetry performance flourished during the rise of literary modernism too. From Yeats’s longstanding Monday night gatherings, where he would chant his poems to a custom-made hand-held harp, to Eliot’s first performance of The Waste Land to the Woolf’s after supper on a Sunday, Ottoline Morrell’s glamorous country house weekends, Harold Monro’s public readings at the Poetry Bookshop, or the modernist revival of verse drama, poetry performance saturated modernist London just as much as it had in the previous century.

Harold Monro with the Poetry Bookshop sign, ca. 1920

What had changed were the favored performance styles: instead of the theatrical poses of Victorian amateur performers or the earnestly articulated vowels of Tennyson and Browning, the modernist movement for poetry performance advocated a mode of oral “interpretation” which sought to elide the body and the personality of the reciter entirely, replacing them with a focus on the sensitive rhythmic manifestation of the poem. A language of surrender to the poem permeates early twentieth century discourse on the topic: “the soul of the interpreter should be so possessed by the poem that it follows it instinctively in every modulation and inflection as easily as water flows between winding banks,” breathed Lady Margaret Sackville to the newly formed Poetry Recital Society in 1909. Poet and publisher Harold Monro insisted in 1912 that reciters become “for the time being, a sensitive medium for their conveyance to the audience, rhapsodist rather than exponent, instrument rather than representative.”

As we shall see, most of the poets discussed here were familiar with these recitation contexts and thought long and deeply about performance in relation to their own poetry. By bringing us into direct contact with these performance contexts, listening carefully to these recordings can enhance our sense of the poems in more ways than one. This series will gesture to some of the ways in which these historic recordings can illuminate our understanding of modernist poetry, throwing into relief a sense of what modernity sounds like to us.

To be continued

Isabelle Stuart is a DPhil student currently working between Oxford and Princeton universities, where she researches poetry recitation practices in the period 1889 to 1945. She has edited and written for the Oxonian Review and the Cambridge Humanities Review.