ABSTRACT
Popular in the Victorian age, poetic “songs,” and musically themed poems became an important vessel for modernist experimentation in the twentieth century, a line of continuity mapped out in this chapter. Walter Pater’s famous statement that “all arts should aspire to the condition of music” captured, and indeed guided, a musical conception of English poetry in the later nineteenth century, such as in the work of Swinburne, Dowson, and Symons. As a case study of this musical conception of poetry, the 1895 anthology Victorian Songs presents a wide range of examples of English “songs” and poems identified with instrumental genres of music, framed by a set of engravings that promote the union of the arts as an inspiration for American poets. The poem of instrumental music had a specifically mid-nineteenth-century genesis in France and England, and was carried over into the United States in the 1890s by such means as Victorian Songs. There, it fructified in the work of both minor poets and those we now think of as modernist, including Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. The second half of this chapter focuses on Eliot’s “Preludes” of 1910 in light of this history, examining the poem’s Victorian precedents and the specific influence of music critic James Huneker, whose work on Chopin Eliot read in college. While the gender dynamics of Victorian Songs and Eliot’s “Preludes” are opposed, they share a vision of transcending print through music. The ideal of achieving the immediacy of sensory perception in poetry was, for different reasons, central both to Victorian and modernist poetics.
