Introduction

Included in Amy Levy's second collection of poetry, A Minor Poet and Other Verse, are poems that express erotic love alongside and through a palpable, physically-charged experience of music. Situating art firmly within society is an important point not just for understanding general movements within musicological and literary studies, but also for the idea that poetry specifically has a statement to make about culture. This chapter provides an overview of this book. The book demonstrates the importance of collections of "national songs" and "national airs" published around 1800; these were, significantly, texts printed without music. It investigates this idea of the poet's body as musical instrument by reviewing eighteenth-century medical discourse on the nerve, which uses musical instruments as a metaphor for the mind and body. The book concentrates on the harp as a framing device, which seems to figure a unity while also allowing an interplay between voices.