Yimon Lo is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen and Research Fellow at the University of Leuven. She researches eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British literature, with a particular focus on poetry and poetics. Her work has appeared in journals including Romanticism, English: Journal of the English Association, The Coleridge Bulletin and the Tennyson Research Bulletin. Her first book, Musical Wordsworth: Romantic Soundscape and Harmony, which we discuss below, was recently published by Liverpool University Press.
1) How did you first become interested in reading Wordsworth’s poetry through the lens of music and musicality?
Growing up with fond memories of playing instruments and going to classical concerts, I have always been fascinated by the close connection between poetry and music. Among the many Romantic poets, I was particularly drawn to the works of Wordsworth, but not because he was known for his musical abilities. Quite the contrary – he was criticised by some of his contemporaries as unmusical. For example, Edward Quillinan once commented that Wordsworth was a poet who ‘had no ear for instrumental music’, and Henry Crabb Robinson even poked fun at a time when Wordsworth fell asleep at a musical party. Despite these remarks, I thought that Wordsworth’s poetry contained very impressive musical references and auditory imagery, as well as complex thematic and stylistic engagements with the music of verse.
So this made me wonder: How can we define the sense of musicality in Wordsworth’s poetry? What is the function of his musical ideas in theory and practice? How did Wordsworth transfer his understanding of formal and metrical musicality to his representations of the imaginative effects of auditory perception?
2) In your introduction, you write that ‘The principal aim of this book is to examine Wordsworth’s unique expression of poetic harmony’. How did you decide to place harmony at the book’s heart?
I didn’t have harmony as a central theme in mind when I first set out to write my book. However, as I delved deeper into Wordsworth’s poetic theory and practice, I found that the word kept appearing in his works, in both his prose and verse. One of the most striking examples is his representation of the poetic mind as ‘framed even like the breath / And harmony of music.’ Wordsworth also believed that ‘a pure and refined scheme of harmony’ should prevail in all ‘higher poetry’. In ‘the music of harmonious metrical language’, he locates ‘a complex feeling of delight’. Even in his thoughts on poetic form, harmony was a guiding principle. Wordsworth looked to ‘the dignified simplicity and majestic harmony’ of Milton’s sonnets as a model for his private reflection and public preoccupations.
This idea of harmony extends beyond just the sound of the words themselves. The complex and multifarious connotations of the term take my reading of Wordsworth’s formal musicality and sound imagery to a more philosophical level. Rather than simply viewing his auditory poetics as the sounding of words or reading through the lens of metrical appreciation, I explore how Wordsworth carefully crafted his musical language and metaphors as a tool for expressing his theory of the imagination and the function of poetry, as well as his views on life, nature, and humanity.
3) Which of Wordsworth’s poems do you see as being most central to his engagements with music?
In my book, I examined a wide selection of Wordsworth’s lyrical poems, ranging from The Prelude and the ‘Intimations Ode’ to less familiar works like ‘The unremitting voice of nightly streams’ and ‘A Night-Piece’, each musical on its own right. Out of all the poems I considered ‘musical’, I chose to conclude the book with ‘The Solitary Reaper’. This is mainly because of how exquisitely the poem showcases both the simplicity and complexity of Wordsworth’s auditory achievements, celebrating the diversity and multiplicity essential to Wordsworthian musicality and harmony. The poem, I think, is, in itself, a song – a harmony, in poetic terms, between lyric and narrative, definiteness and indefiniteness, presence and absence, sense and imagination, nature and humanity, self and community, loss and consolation. It is one of Wordsworth’s most remarkable poems, exemplifying how the idea of song and music performs a harmony associated with formal aesthetics, aural perception, and sensibility while also functioning as a thematic preoccupation and an imaginative and philosophical influence.
4) Which critics and music theorists did you find it most fruitful to employ in your analysis?
James H. Donelan’s Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic (2008) was particularly helpful in shaping my auditory apprehension of the confluence between musical aesthetics and Romantic philosophy in Wordsworth’s poetry. His understanding of Wordsworth’s use of metaphors of music as a reflection of his attitude towards poetic form and metrical structure informed my reading of a sense of harmony and musicality associated with Wordsworth’s theory of the imagination, his notions of wise passiveness and organic sensibility, and his conception and practice of lyricism.
My interpretation of the abstract function and mechanism of Wordsworth’s musicality was also influenced by concepts from music psychology, aesthetics, practice, and perception, even though Wordsworth was not personally informed or directly influenced by musical studies. In my chapters on Wordsworth’s associative auditory memory and expectation, I benefited from music psychologist and philosopher Leonard B. Meyer’s theory of musical meaning and emotion, and music psychology and cognition expert David Huron’s theory of expectation. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of rhythmanalysis and John Cage’s theory of audible silence were also helpful to my reading of Wordsworth’s urban rhythm and his poetics of silence. These works provided a framework and relevant vocabulary for me to understand Wordsworth’s metrical art, his writings about the processes of listening, and his representations and descriptions of soundscapes.
5) What new projects are you currently working on?
I am currently editing a collection of essays entitled Romantic Synchronicity: Literary Coincidence and the Poetics of Simultaneity. The volume situates British Romanticism in dialogue with established theories of synchronicity. It sheds light on the significance of the phenomenon of synchronicity in shaping a global and interdisciplinary understanding of Romantic literature and culture. The volume invites academics with different approaches and from different epistemic traditions to reflect on how meaningful coincidences and simultaneity across generic, disciplinary, and national boundaries characterise the Romantic impulse towards creative spontaneity and experimentation. The essays will explore how the acausality and multiplicity of synchronicity account for the presence of uncertainty in the unity and wholeness of the Romantic imagination and in the production of poetic pleasure.