From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs. Terence Allan Hoagwood.

Abstract

Terence Allan Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) 196 $84.00 Focusing on simulation of and role Romantic poets played in industrializing of and of those industrial products (xi), Terence Alan Hoagwood's From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs builds upon insights articulated by such scholars as William Laffan, Sean Shesgreen, and Dave Harker. In series of finely nuanced arguments, book documents Romantics' use of various poetical and commercial sleights of hand to exploit their readers' love of song, showing how resultant pseudo-songs sometimes self-reflexively make theme of their own simulative status (xii). Chapter 1 provides an overview of pseudo-song genre, beginning with commentary on Psalms and psalmic imitation in writings of John Milton, Isaac Watts, Joel Barlow and others, before discussing ways in which pastoral poets such as Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, and Spenser used the language of oral song as metaphor for written (2). The chapter identifies two types of Romantic pseudo-song: those poems ... are sold as if they were songs when they are entirely scriptorial or typographical objects; and those that refer to and use rhetorical resources to conjure imaginary mu sical effects, without pretending to be, really, music (4-5). Subsequently, chapter examines musical references in selection of Romantic poems, including Shelley's Music, when soft voices die, The Revolt of Islam, and Prometheus Unbound; Blake's Introduction to Songs of Innocence; Felicia Hemans's A Spanish Lady; several of Keats's odes and Clare's pastorals; and some miscellaneous poems by Letitia Elizabeth Landon. These close readings helpfully set stage for more focused discussions of individual authors and texts that follow. Chapter 2 demonstrates how Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of Scottish Border engages the paradox of using writing as means of ostensibly cherishing and preserving orality while replacing it (24). To illustrate this process, Hoagwood first considers Scott's primitivist claim that Scottish poetry was inseparable from song prior to the advent of literacy and ... widespread adoption of English language in Scotland (27). Just as James Macpherson's Ossian epics and Thomas Percy's Reliques exploited their audience's desire to recapture poetic glories of Scotland's savage past, so Scott invoked popular image of poet as bard in order to exploit same sense of nationalistic folkloric nostalgia (30). In series of incisive close readings of Scott's poems and their accompanying prose commentaries, Hoagwood reveals a story of increasing fictitiousness: narratives of supposedly historical fact are succeeded by supposedly authentic relics of superstitious culture followed by admittedly faux ballads, referring to neither historical realities nor historical origins (30-31). Linking this fictitiousness to contemporary British politics, he demonstrates how themes in Minstrelsy build upon conservative principles set forth in Burke's Reflections on Revolution in France. The chapter concludes by showing how Scott's Lay of Last Minstrel and The Lady of Lake achieved commercial success by self-consciously highlighting same themes of authenticity and fictitiousness that had previously made Minstrelsy such popular commodity. In Chapter 3, Hoagwood focuses perceptive critical eye on Sydney Owenson's The Lay of an Harp. Although this work seems to espouse nationalism, From Song to Print endorses view that Owenson's literary ambition and appeal were much more Anglo than Irish (45). To illustrate, Hoagwood examines Owenson's role in marketing her poetry, which included what would now be called commercial tie-ins and product placements, showing how costumes she wore and green harp she played at English aristocratic revelries entailed concerted commodification of Irishness (48-9). …