From Song to Print Romantic Pseudo-Songs [Paperback]

From Song to Print is a study of the major cultural transition from oral forms of art and discourse to the commercial culture of print that happened during the Industrial Revolution. Through a discussion of ancient musical forms (classical, biblical, and early-modern poetry of song), this book explores the typographical simulation of music and oral poetry during the nineteenth century. Original and innovative, this work shows how the musical writings of Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, evoke antique cultures and ancient settings while offering a critique of their own imitative forms and the modern, commercial context in which they appear.Romantic-Period Poetry and the 'Sweet Power of Song' 'Ballad Deception' and Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border The Lay of an Irish Harp: The Pseudo-Songs of Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) Contradictory Arts: Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies? 'It Gave Them Virtues Not Their Own': Byron's Hebrew Melodies Conclusion

Hoagwood (English, Texas A&M Univ.) offers an intriguing discussion of Romantic-era pseudo-songs, poems that were written to give the impression that they were lyrics without ever actually having been attached to music. The author presents an excellent overview of the subject and then concentrates on the pseudo-songs of Sir Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, Thomas Moore, and Lord Byron . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. - CHOICE

Hoagwood sweeps magisterially through British Romanticism, fixing our attention on poetic simulations, what he calls pseudo-songs, identifying their common features as well as marks of their historical progression, while never allowing us to forget that these poems preserve within the art of their contradictions the power of revelation. Sir Walter Scott, Lady Morgan, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Letitia Landon - each of these poets represents an alternative Romanticism curling back upolc@