Melodies Unheard:Deaf Poets and Their Subversion of the "Sound" Theory of Poetry John Lee Clark (bio) The deaf poet is no oxymoron. But one would think so, given the popular understanding that poetry has sound and voice at its heart. Add to this the popular philosophy that maintains that deafness reduces the human experience, and the result is that deaf poets are often objects of amazement or dismissal and their work is rarely judged on its merit beyond the context of their deafness. Deaf poets in the United States have had to contend with sound not only because some members of the mainstream culture consider deaf people a lesser variety of the human race but also because so much emphasis has been placed on sound as it relates to their chosen art. This marginalization was especially acute in the nineteenth century, when poetry was expected to consist of a rhyme scheme and an identifiable metrical pattern. Such requirements so discouraged deaf poet John Carlin (18131891) that he considered giving up on poetry. "I was convinced," he wrote, "that I could never be what I so ardently desireda correct writer of verses." Fortunately, the perceptive hearing poet William Cullen Bryant pressed Carlin to continue writing poetry and recommended that he rely on rhyming dictionaries. Carlin eventually published many poems, including [End Page 4] "The Mute's Lament" in the first issue of American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb in 1847. However, the hearing editor could not resist adding a note to the poem: "How shall he who has not now and who never has had the sense of hearing, who is totally without what the musicians call an ear, succeed in preserving all the niceties of accent, measure, and rhythm? We should almost as soon expect a man born blind to become a landscape painter as one born deaf to produce poetry of even tolerable merit." Despite the reaction of incredulity that Carlin's poems evoked, deaf poet Laura C. Redden (18391923) initially experienced the opposite. That the acclaimed "Howard Glyndon" (Redden's nom de plume) was a woman was well known, but that she was also deaf was not. When critics learned of the fact, many of them lowered their earlier opinion of her poetry. Infuriated, Redden responded with her 1870 autobiographical allegory, "Down Low" (later retitled "The Realm of Singing"), in which she portrays herself as a bird with a crippled wing trying to make a place for herself in the fabled Realm of Singing. After some attempts, the bird wins praise from a band of soldiers passing through the forest on their way home. But when the soldiers discover that the bird is crippled, they abandon her, saying, as did Redden's critics, "What have we here? A crippled bird that tries to sing? Such a thing was never heard of before. It is impossible for her to sing correctly under such circumstances and we were certainly mistaken in thinking that there was anything in such songs. Our ears have deceived us.'" Readers will agree that a crippled wing has nothing to do with a bird's ability to sing. Yet many will nevertheless pause before applying this concept to deafness and poetry. Even some deaf poets themselves were plagued by doubts about their ability to write poetryor at least "good" poetry that would be respected by the mainstream audience. Such doubts have always been linked with audism, which is the beliefimposed by the hearing society and internalized by many Deaf peoplethat people with "hearing loss" are inferior. One troubled poet was Howard L. Terry, who wrote in the foreword to his 1929 book, Sung in Silence, "In offering these poems to the public I feel as if I were throwing a snowball into a red-hot furnace!" Terry [End Page 5] anticipated that he would not find many appreciative readers because his poems savored of the old formalism. In defense, he explained his view of the problems the deaf poet faced: Deafness retards daily mental growth. The deaf man slowly falls behind his hearing brother. He moves with the slower shore current, while his fortunate brother is hurrying along...