The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry

Written language does not represent the way we speak.

Intonation, accent, tempo, and pitch of utterance can be inferred from a written text but are not clearly demonstrated.

This is the starting point for this text which shows the implications of this fact for linguists and philosophers of language and offers fundamental criticisms of some recent work in these fields.

It aims principally to describe the ways in which nineteenth-century English poets - Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins - responded creatively to the ambiguities involved in writing down their own voices, the melodies of their speech. Original readings of the poets' work are given, both at a detailed level and with regard to major preoccupations of the period - immortality, morbidity, marriage, social divisions and religious conversions.