Original scientific paper
Complexities of Voice in the Poetry of William Wordsworth
Martina Domines Veliki
orcid.org/0000-0002-3785-7177
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The question of language in Wordsworthian criticism focuses today on the description
of the difference within and between written and spoken discourses. Though
Wordsworth was fascinated with all kinds of written language, he is also a poet of
speech, “a man speaking to men” (1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads) with “another ear”
for the sounds and voices around him. The multifarious occurrences of sound/voice,
as metonymic images of speech, do not serve only as a backdrop to Wordsworth’s
expression of the self but are a dynamic force shaping and aff ecting the “I” of the
poet. This paper looks at some of the greatest Wordsworth’s poems such as The Prelude,
the Intimations Ode, Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence, to see how
the self grows from the child’s silent reading of “the eternal deep”, where his “mute
dialogues” do not refer to the absence of voice but rather to “a communication, (…)
a speech deprived of speech, language deprived of speaking” (Warminski1987: 23)
into the self of a poet-prophet hearing the voices to which others were oblivious – the
voices of the poor and the oppressed in the heat of the French Revolution.
Keywords
language; sound/voice; individual vs. social self; covenant between mind and nature
Hrčak ID:
40449
URI
Publication date:
26.5.2009.
Visits: 1.352 *