On Voice in Poetry

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction Voice in Poetry: Opening up a Concept

   • David Nowell Smith

   Pages 1-14

3. A Natural Scale

   • David Nowell Smith

   Pages 15-47

4. Vibration and Difference

   • David Nowell Smith

   Pages 48-76

5. Turnings of the Breath

   • David Nowell Smith

   Pages 77-104

6. ‘The Multitudinous Tongue’

   • David Nowell Smith

   Pages 105-136

7. Getting the Measure of Voice

   • David Nowell Smith

   Pages 137-162

8. Back Matter

   Pages 163-202

   PDF

What do we mean by 'voice' in poetry? In this work, David Nowell Smith teases out the diverse meanings of 'voice', from a poem's soundworld to the rhetorical gestures through which poems speak to us, in order to embark on a philosophical exploration of the concept of voice itself.

• Poetics
• Voice
• Contemporary Poetry
• Literary Theory
• Lyric
• Poetry
• Orality
• Politics of Literature
• Phenomenology
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Charles Baudelaire
• Jacques Derrida
• Paul Celan
• Jacques Rancière
• Henri Chopin
• Johann Gottfriend von Herder
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Julia Kristeva
• John Wilkinson
• Sean Bonney
• poem
• poetry
• rhetoric

“Nowell Smith begins and ends with Hopkins, giving circular coherence, but each chapter is individually ‘essayistic,’ offering a ‘speculative poetics.’ … what is explored here is explored brilliantly. … this is a fascinating work of animation.” (Rebecca Varley-Winter, The Goose, Vol. 14 (2), February, 2016)

• University of East Anglia, UK

  David Nowell Smith

David Nowell Smith is Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is also author of Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (2013).

Policies and ethics