ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth's modification of 'sound' to the 'ghost of sound' captures the elusive, yet somehow palpable, effects of twilit music. His phrase might seem commonplace enough, but its ghostly manifestation of a sound that is barely perceptible as sound at all speaks tellingly to Romanticism's spectral presences in the past, present, and future. Romanticism as a haunted and haunting presence becomes, as Paul de Man comments on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, 'the ghostly memory of mourned absences'. Wordsworth's 'ghostly language' conjures up a specter of a forgotten past only to obliterate its original form in the moment of its projected future as a spectral presence. His romantic specters are the allusive and elusive 'ghost of sound' within Romanticism and heard in the subtle, yet perceptible, Romantic echoes forever present in the theory and practice of post-Romanticism.
