Poetry and Reform: Resounding the Ode

Abstract

Critical neglect of the scope, originality, and ambition of Thelwall’s poetic theory and practice, especially after the 1790s, has excluded him from the some of the most exciting reformulations of Romanticism. Nowhere is this loss more grievously felt than in the ode, a genre that according to Duff, “has some claim to be representative of Romanticism” (201) and one to which Thelwall gave priority in his poetic oeuvre.¹ Duff uses the ode to summarize the paradox of Romantic genre as a whole: How is it that a form so ostentatiously artificial and self-consciously rhetorical in its defining forms of address and emotion should have become the favorite of writers who “sought to revolutionize British poetry by excluding all rhetorical contrivance and replacing poetic diction with the language of ordinary speech”? (202). To that question the work of Thelwall offers an answer that challenges Duff’s fundamental premises about the revolutionary nature of Romanticism. For as I have already shown, Thelwall is revolutionary, not in his adaptation of ordinary speech to the uses of poetry, but in his active and artful adoption of poetic speech as a political instrument, to help the people of Britain to cultivate and exercise “practical fluency” (PEJ 400). His poetico-elocutionary theory and practice anticipate and complement re-soundings and reformulations of Romanticism by Newlyn, Esterhammer, and Wolfson (among others), foregrounding its performative nature, and returning attention to a sophisticated secondary orality that has been long overshadowed by a critical overemphasis on primary orality and the “real language of men.”

A voice—or emanation that might seem

To the tense-listening heart, an in-voic’d stream

Of more than mortal colloquy there came:—

A music of the spheres

(Thelwall, “A Night-Walk”)

O for some soul-affecting scheme

Of moral music, to unite

Wanderers whose portion is the faintest dream

Of memory!—

(Wordsworth, “On the Power of Sound”)