Romantic-Period Poetry and the “Sweet Power of Song”

Abstract

Pseudo-songs have an ancient history. For example, Herbert J. Levine has written of the evolution of Psalms from instrumental music to singing accompanied with “harp and timbrel, cymbals and lyre,” and then to the silence of texts: “in deference to those exalted memories [of David’s musicianship], the rabbis who constructed classical Judaism forbade instrumental accompaniment of worship”; “the Psalms took on new life as scriptural lessons, a development that also took place within the early centuries of Christianity.”1 Eric Werner points out that, in the fourth century, John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, had stated the advantage of the psalms’ musical component in terms of what would now be called “escapism”: such singing had the power “to keep the mind free from the happenings of daily life.”2 When the Psalms became scripts rather than musical performances, their association with music (by means of references to music rather than music) persisted. Obviously, the social function of pseudo-songs changes drastically over historical time and in differing cultural spaces, but both of these early developments persist into the British Romantic period, where the genre flourishes in a new and commercially successful way: it appears in the shift from orality to writing, paradoxically conceived as a means of honoring orality; and the genre entails an appeal to inner feelings as a pleasing alternative to reality.