Language, Music, and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge

Originally published in 1987, this book forms a conceptual account of the relationship between music and poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kevin Barry argues that this relationship is more important than previous scholarship, with its emphasis on the visual analogy (comparing poetry with painting rather than with music), allowed for. Coleridge believed that music was ‘the rhythm of the soul’s movements’ and declared himself to be ‘in a state of Spirit much more akin’ to Mozart’s or Beethoven’s than to that of any painter. Dr Barry examines in detail the ways of thinking about poetry, music and language (in its broadest sense) during the period that preceded Coleridge, referring to the work of philosophers and poets such as Hume, Berkeley, Rousseau, Collins, Blake, Cowper and Wordsworth, but also to lesser-known theorists such as James Usher, Thomas Twining, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart and de Gerando.