Effacing the music in edmund waller's poems

Abstract

AbstractReturning to London from exile in 1652, Edmund Waller found that his poems had been circulating, without his knowledge or permission, in at least two separate printed editions; within the next five years, six of his lyrics would appear as musical settings in printed collections of songs by the composer Henry Lawes. This article takes at face value Waller's own somewhat surprising expression of relief to discover that his texts had been corrupted by ‘mistaking Printer’ and ‘ill Reciter’ alike. Through close readings of ‘To Mr. Henry Lawes, who had then newly set a song of mine in the year 1635’ and ‘To a lady singing a song of his own composing’, I argue that poems ostensibly about song also articulate anxieties about the work of art in the age of (early) mechanical reproduction: not that the author might become alienated from his own words through the unpredictable vicissitudes of transmission and circulation, but that his text could become estranged, paradoxically, through overly precise replication. Waller's poems explore how perfect, echoic repetition of the poetic text, whether through vocal performance or printed book, presented a possible threat to a sense of authorial voice.