“Voice” is the most elemental and elusive part of poetry. Hearing a poem’s voice, or voices, is essential to experiencing it as a poem, but saying exactly what we mean by that is difficult. In one sense, “voice” is a metaphor, since black letters on a white page are literally silent. And yet the concept of voice in poetry seems far more than figurative because a poem that remains inaudible also remains inaccessible. Voice, as Christopher Smart’s line suggests, is where the poem’s mentality and physicality join.

One of the most influential early readings of an eighteenth-century poem appears in Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, and it shows the challenge of paying adequate attention to poetic voice. Hearing a poem fully is an act of sympathetic imagination, not simply intelligence. Wordsworth was an astute critic as well as a great poet, but his reading of Thomas Gray’s Sonnet on the Death of Richard West is a misreading, the sort of partial portrait ambitious young poets often need to create of their predecessors. Wordsworth uses Gray’s sonnet (1742, published 1775) to illustrate what he regarded as the lamentable “poetic diction” that had infected poetry over the past century. We will take up the question of diction elsewhere in this book. Pertinent here is Wordsworth’s view of his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads as an experiment in liberating poetry from eighteenth-century phrasing. He quotes Gray’s sonnet in full and insists that only five lines, which he put in italics, possess “any value,” supposedly because they use the direct language of prose:

1. In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,

2. And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:

3. The birds in vain their amorous descant join,

4. Or cheerful fields resume their green attire:

5. These ears, alas! for other notes repine,

6. A different object do these eyes require.

7. My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;

8. And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.

9. Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,

10. And new-born pleasure brings to happier men:

11. The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;

12. To warm their little loves the birds complain.

13. I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,

14. And weep the more because I weep in vain.