The Voice Prints of Poetry: Recorded Speech and the Listener’s Body in Victorian and Modernist Verse
Journal: TSpace
Year: 2020

In The Poetry of Experience, Robert Langbaum places the dramatic monologue from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot at the heart of the “modern literary tradition,” describing it as a “poetry of sympathy” that engages the reader through feeling. In this dissertation, I argue that Langbaum’s formulation misses the importance of the reader’s body to the construction and dissemination of voice in poetry with dramatic qualities. In arguing for the primacy of the reader’s body, I draw on an extensive scholars