understanding of the role of sound in poetry.
Deaf poets extend this understanding of the textuality and conventionality of sound to the “voice” of a poem. That is, deaf poetry relegates the orality that appears so frequently in the sounds unheard genre to a product, rather than the source, of writing. My reading of these deaf poets is aligned with Prins’s, Tucker’s, and Kreilkamp’s understandings of how writing can produce an imagined echo of vocality. For example, Kitto subsumes the various sounds of nature and music in his poem “Mary,” including the ever-present nightingale, into the fraught concept of voice:
And so beneath o’ershadowing trees,
I’ve heard leaves rustle in the breeze,
Which brought me the melodious tale
Of all the vocal nightingale.
Or else the cushat’s coo of pride
Over his new mated bride;—
Yes: I have heard thee—Nature, thee,
In all thy thousand voices speak,
Which now are silent all to me:—
(lines 44–52)
Not only does Kitto attribute a “voice” to the nightingale, but he also categorizes the entire sonic register of the poem as Nature’s “thousand voices.” Kitto, who became deaf at the age of twelve, uses writing to describe sounds he can no longer hear and then to name these sounds “voice.” In “Thoughts on Music,” Peet also surveys the sounds around her in service of a higher “voice” that encapsulates all sounds:
And then they tell of the sounds which come
Afar from the sea’s deep caves,
Of the voice of the wind which sighs among
Old oceans’ towering waves;
And the wild, deep music, which comes up
From the breaker’s dashing roar
And the storm cloud’s voice, when, as in wrath,
His torrents madly pour.
(lines 9–16)
Peet’s stanzas list various sounds she cannot hear, such as “lark’s glad trill” (line 19) and “the evening zephyr’s notes” (line 30), in a progression toward the idea that within all these sounds, which she calls “Nature’s thousand tones” (line 39), there echoes one “voice,” presumably the voice of God (line 38).
This cacophony of orality appears frequently in sounds unheard poetry, from frequent references to human voices to descriptions of the “storm cloud’s voice” (Peet, “Thoughts,” line 15) and “woodlands, vocal with merry tones” (Carlin, “Mute’s,” 8–9). In Simpson’s “Recollections of Hearing,” the “speaker” explains, “nature now remains to me / comparatively dumb” (lines 51–52). In the genre of sounds unheard poetry, nonvocal sounds are transformed into orality through writing. Voices, animate and inanimate, dominate the imagined soundscape of these poems, thereby highlighting both the poet’s thematic alienation from orality and his or her interest in the formal intersection between orality and written poetry. The common construction of written poetry as a secondary product of an original bardic orality cannot incorporate absurd poetry, which is created by poets who sign rather than speak and reverse the traditional model to imagine orality as a secondary product of written poetry.
Because these poems—in their thematic treatments of speaking mutes and sounds unheard—render a textual (rather than audible) voice into print, nineteenth-century deaf poetry simultaneously displaces and conforms to the hegemony of orality in written poetry. These poets were shaped and constrained by both the cultural ideology that disparaged those who did not speak and the poetic ideology that considered poetry a genre of orality. While this absurd poetry strains against this definition by replacing the voice with writing and emphasizing poetry’s accessibility to deaf people, it was nevertheless hedged in by the cultural power of orality. And yet, this tension subversively reveals that the “voice” of a poem is usually metaphorical, and this metaphor is equally available to a deaf poet as to a hearing poet.
Although nineteenth-century deaf poets could not entirely escape poetry’s generic tie to orality, they created a position for themselves in the phonocentric landscape of nineteenth-century poetry by calling their writing “speech.” But this invocation of orality never eschews writing. At the center of every absurd poem there is a celebration of writing and an assertion of a deaf person’s right to poetry through their writing ability. One important example of this focus on the deaf poet as a writer, even as the poem imagines poetry as song, occurs in Peet’s “The Castle of Silence”:92
Low bending at thy shrine I come,
O radiant muse of song!
And though no sound my voice may wake,
No low deep tone the echoes break
That tremble round thy throne.
Perchance my hand may touch the lyre,
And bid some chord to thrill,
And though the minstrel’s home-land be
The realm of silence, still may she
Bring soul-gifts, at thy will.
(lines 1–10; italics in original)
Peet maintains the alignment of song and poetry—Kitto’s notion of a “tuneful art”—by understanding poetry’s muse as the muse of song and invoking the chords of the metaphorical lyre of lyric poetry. She does, however, use that metaphor to validate deaf poetry. Peet’s “speaker” replaces the poetic voice with her hand strumming the lyre. Her hand, with its access to both writing and signing, thereby becomes the instrument of poetic creation. Though a dweller of the “realm of silence,” Peet asserts her right to lyric poetry through writing and signing.
Furthermore, Peet’s privileging of her hand as that which connects her to the lyric tradition is even more suggestive in the context of the performance history of this poem. Peet presented “The Castle of Silence” in sign language for an audience of hearing and deaf people at the 1859 closing exercises of the New York Institution of the Deaf and Dumb, from which she had graduated six years earlier. A reporter for the New York Times in attendance applauded Peet’s “muse” and declared that her “words were fitted together . . . euphoniously.”93Despite the reporter’s invocation of poetic sound, and the fact that the poem may also have been recited orally, the poem was primarily produced and disseminated in sign. This moment where Peet silently signs her “euphonious” poem—a strictly rhymed poem that defends silent deaf poetry—embodies the central tension of nineteenth-century deaf poetry. This poetry vacillates between adherence to and subversion of the hegemony of the voice in nineteenth-century English poetry. On one hand, these poets typically conformed to conventional patterns of rhythm and rhyme to demonstrate their poetic abilities. On the other hand, they challenged the alignment of poetry and sound through emphasizing the apparent contradictions of deaf poetry. This simultaneous formal capitulation and thematic resistance in the previously unexplored canon of deaf poetry offers a new perspective on the relationship between sound and poetry. Nineteenth-century deaf poetry insistently places writing, rather than speech,
