The Soundscape of Victorian Poetry

While the visual world of Victorian poetry has been carefully charted by critics, through its rich history of illustrations and ornaments, the world of sound remains largely unexplored. This talk offers a guide to the soundscape of Victorian poetry, in terms of how poems represent, mediate, and produce sounds, and how those sounds are in turn enfolded into poetic form. In particular, the soundscape of ephemeral poems published in periodicals, magazines and newspapers, which collectively represent the most prolific publishers of poems in the era, affords an opportunity to track the soundscape of Victorian poetry at scale, through a case study of the poetry corpus of the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project (https://dvpp.uvic.ca/)