Poetry in the age of new sound technology: Mallarmé to Tennyson

Abstract

The meaning that sounds carry has always mattered to poetry but in a culture developing new communication technology using sound, the Victorians heard poetry's capacities to signal to the ear anew. This essay considers a number of poets writing after the invention, principally, of Morse code, the telegraph and the telephone, and their culturally-pertinent ruminations on what human messages sound could bear across across space and time. The essay concludes with Alfred Tennyson's life-long interest in the meanings of sound. It suggests ways in which telegraphy provides an analogue to his conceptions of the survival of the meaning of the dead through messages in the air.