Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 by Angela Esterhammer

Abstract

288 BOOK REVIEWS feet.” With their material rhythms, poetic words impart “relational” calm and healing psychological worth for “the ravage of adult traumatic shock” (198), even as, or even because, they are carried “along and away” (203). For this book’s authors, the theorized turn to things and limits promises to revise, in Hartman’s words, “not only a narrow historical materialism but also adversarial and coercive doctrines of transcendence” (quoted, 207). It ofcourse is no great surprise that in Wordsworth, ofall poets, knowledge is implicated in forms ofmediation, with the material world looming across the varied thresholds of representation. What is a pleasant and most wel­ come surprise in reading Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory is the way Regier and Uhlig’s collection casts such a fresh look at the poet’s intriguingly complex, frequently profound, interrelation of knowledge, language, and experience in his prefaces and poems, among other things. Kurt Fosso Lewis & Clark College Angela Esterhammer. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750—1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pp. 269. $103.00. Angela Esterhammer’s book takes us into a world that is entirely lost, and yet continues to resonate. Indeed, the theatricality of poetic improvisation resonates perhaps more today than through all the years, including the Ro­ mantic years, during which oral poetry, and especially improvised poetry, was frequently dismissed as an incompetent adjunct to its infinitely more cultured and complex written cousin. The shared cultural focus on perfor­ mance and reception of recent decades is perhaps part of what has made this book possible and certainly feeds into the remarkable richness of its analysis. What is lost to us (but restored in this volume) is the intricate para­ phernalia that surrounded the improvisation of poetiy in the 18th and much of the 19th centuries, in small groups or large, in a hall or a drawing­ room or the open air, particularly in its homeland, Italy. Try to imagine the scene. There is a poet who is the center of attention. There is an audience which sets the themes of the poems that are to be created and delivered there on the spot. This audience can set the meters too, and sometimes the rhyme words, and sometimes the intercalari, set phrases to be inserted at given moments of the composition. The themes are drawn by lot, the au­ dience is waiting. The whole performance is going to last a couple of hours. Once the preliminaries are over, the poet takes a short time to reflect; during this time, the musical accompanist, ifthere is one, will play a kind ofprelude. The waiting time sharpens the audience’s expectations and SiR, 51 (Summer 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 289 gives the poet a head-start from the very first moment of a process in which he must always be thinking ahead at the same time as he is uttering his verses. The moment when the poet rises to his or her feet and begins to speak, or sing, or chant, or recite, or declaim, is the moment ofthe “libera­ tion” ofthe song. Once she has started, the improviser cannot stop, neither can she go back and correct. The improvisations of which we have a writ­ ten record bear the marks of orality to a greater or lesser extent: the fre­ quent presence of marks connoting the act of speech; abundance of apos­ trophes, exclamations and rhetorical questions; repetition, recurrent sounds, enumeration; the use of ekphrasis as the dominant rhetorical trope. We are in a metaphorical theater, where the audience can react, silently, by look, by gesture or by sound, by joining in (vocalizing possible rhymewords , for example). Repetition, which would be a sign ofbad writing, was functionally necessary in an improvisation where the poet had to ensure he was being followed and understood in a situation in which the audience was mixed, the acoustics were not necessarily perfect, and the poet himself was gesticulating and moving around, probably not always facing the audi­ ence. Repetition also helped to reinforce the persuasiveness of the dis­ course. Improvisation is a fundamentally competitive genre: the poet is sometimes in competition with other poets on the same stage, but always in competition with himself and with the audience, which...