The Voice and the Echo of Romantic Poetry

Abstract

The inherence of textuality and meaning in the relation of the voice and the reading in the lyrical discourse appears with a special intensity. In the romantic poetry the materialisation of language into pure signals is presented as the threat of the speech with the termination of the co-existence of writing and voicing. The modern poetry tries to bridge this fracture, makes huge efforts for the co-operation between message and channels of the transmission. The echo is that romantic motif and rhyme technical method, which first brings to scene the difference between voice and speaker. It makes the words hearable in such a manner that their direct source is already not the subject of the language. For example E. A. Poe’s poem (The Raven) implements a „materializing” process, consequently the immateriality of the memory may be incarnated in the voice of speaker, and in the heard and loudly repeated pronoun („nevermore”). This metamorphosis manifests the hidden, authentic meaningful capability of language, that was considered until then as only a denoting-semiotic structure. This way the romanticism ties the signs of the paper sheet and their sounding to the immateriality of human voice and seems to have been unavoidable until our days as regards the poetic existence of language.