"The Mournful Echo": Intimacy in American Recitations and Periodical Reprinting of "Mother and Poet," 1861–1879

Abstract

"The Mournful Echo":Intimacy in American Recitations and Periodical Reprinting of "Mother and Poet," 1861–1879 Elizabeth Howard (bio) In Book I of Aurora Leigh, the young author Aurora asks of her sources of inspiration, "My own best poets am I one with you/That thus I love you, or but one through love?"1 While Elizabeth Barrett Browning's heroine debates the causes of her affinity for the poetry of others, the intimacy she feels toward them she asserts without qualification.2 While the possibilities for intimacy between poem, poet, and reader are expansive, Aurora's "oneness" describes affinity, proximity, and even exclusivity as features of poetic intimacy. In addition to the reader's or audience's affinity with a particular poet, poems can also foster poetic intimacy outside the textual boundaries of the poem itself, largely by means of the physical spaces and pages in which they appear and reappear. Of the spaces for aural poetry performances in the mid-nineteenth century, the salon curated an intimacy defined by its shared-but-semiprivate setting, its discrete temporality, and the slippage between audience and performers. The periodical likewise fostered a poetic intimacy with its readers, curating textual spaces on the printed page, which mediated the reader's intimacy with the poem as well as with an "imagined community" of readers and editors.3 A case study of poetic media's competing claims to intimacy in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay juxtaposes two media replications of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Mother and Poet" (1861) between 1861 and 1879—the salon recitation and the periodical reprinting—to assess each medium's curation of intimacy in a poetic encounter. My transatlantic analysis of U.S. performances and reprintings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem during and after the American Civil War not only opens comparative contexts for curating poetic intimacy, but it also underscores poetry's capacity to voice mimetic grief across national boundaries in a variety of media. [End Page 165] I begin this essay reviewing recitations of "Mother and Poet," giving comparative attention to performances in salon spaces. Consolidating the popular criteria for evaluation, I compare salon recitations of "Mother and Poet" with reviews of its performance in concert halls, at benefit readings, and school recitations. In a wide range of recitations of "Mother and Poet," the poem's death events are often eclipsed by the audience's interest in the poem's emotional expression, particularly how grief sounds when voiced by a body. "Mother and Poet" generated a particular enthusiasm not only for its performative possibilities in vocalizing pathos, but also for its aural experience since recitations of "Mother and Poet" change the print poem's aural imaginary into an explicitly auditory experience. American reviews of recitations of "Mother and Poet" give their attention almost exclusively to the interaction between the performer's voice, physical presence, and persona in a particular space.4 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem gives its dramatic attention to a grieving mother who describes her plight with italicized first-person pronouns and third-person demonstrative adjectives; if Emilio and Alfredo are absented by their death, their mother is adamantly present in the poem; she is both the emphatic "me" who ends the first stanza (l. 5) and the agonized "This woman, this" of the second stanza (l. 8). In reviews of recitations of "Mother and Poet," however, the particularity of "[t]his woman, this" is tethered to the performer: the audience shares its intimacy in an aural experience with the voice and presence of a particular performer in ways that efface or diminish the presence of the grieving mother in the poem. In its American periodical reprintings, the attention that "Mother and Poet" gives to the grieving speaker—its "This woman, this"—likewise shifts its object away from Barrett Browning's narrator. This time, however, the American periodical reprintings of the 1860s overwhelmingly emphasize the imagined American maternal reader as sharing with the poem's Italian narrator a similar, even an identical crisis of loss. In the periodical the poem is given direct explanatory power to describe the familial costs of the American Civil War over the 1860s and 1870s. The poem is reprinted...