Visual and Verbal in Poetry

Abstract

The Romantic era witnessed an explosion of printed materials that included both verbal and visual texts. Technological advances in papermaking, printing methods, and commercial marketing made it increasingly easy – both mechanically and economically – to incorporate the two artistic media on the printed page, producing interdisciplinary, or ‘multimedia’, texts that appealed to broad sectors of the growing British market for books and other printed materials. Texts of this sort were not intended solely for educated adult readers, however. Illustrated poetry texts, for example, constituted a less challenging reading experience for newly literate or developing readers, including children of all ages. Because the sonic, rhythmic, and mnemonic features of verse are particularly prominent, poetry provided a convenient and effective vehicle for moral, political, and civic instruction addressed to less advanced readers. The truth is that many of the ‘great’ Romantic poems that assumed canonical status among literary historians during the generations that followed were not necessarily the ones that were most read and enjoyed during the period. Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was an overnight sensation that turned a touchy young aristocrat into one of the era's first literary celebrities, but its expensive early editions (the first was priced at 50 shillings) placed the poem well beyond the means of ordinary readers and ensured it an essentially aristocratic readership that could afford – quite literally – to indulge in the poem's famous Weltschmerz .