1. Robert O. Evans, Milton's Elisions (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966), p. 2.

2. See a related sense of punning on "Angels ken" in Edward Le Comte, A Dictionary of Puns in Milton's English Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 10.

3. Le Comte, following Fowler's gloss (ibid., p. 38).

4. Thomas Vogler, "Re: Naming MIL/TON," in Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Thomas Vogler and Nelson Hilton (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 146.

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge to James Gillman, 31 October 1821, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5, 1820-1825, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 185; letter no. 1281.

6. See The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 3, 1808-1819, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 4124.

7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1960), 2:103.

8. M. H. Abrams, "Coleridge's 'A Light in Sound': Science, Metascience, and Poetic Imagination," in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 164.

9. It was Susan Wolfson who called my attention to this phonemic ambiguity in Coleridge.

10. In The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), Susan Wolfson has recently expanded on Cleanth Brooks's suggestion that the urn of the ode is appealing to a kind of hearing "just below the threshold of normal sound" (p. 320). She detects at one point what amounts to the junctural disintegration of "endear'd" when registering a conjoint "sight and sound" pun that "shades into 'end ear'd,'" as if "to signify audience beyond the bourne of 'the sensual ear'" (p. 320).

11. John Keats to Fanny Brawne, [?] March 1820, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:247. break

12. This is the original version of the sonnet given in John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 198 n. 1.

13. Shortly preceding the earliest recorded appearance of the term "sod" as a collective noun for the material of ground cover (rather than simply for a piece of turf)--a usage first cited in the OED from the Romantic writers Hood and Scott--this phrasing from Keats's "Ode" may indeed have helped to instigate such a linguistic change. Tracked back to an antiphonal matrix, the normative sense of "become a sod" is not the speaker's reduction to a single square of earth but, rather (buried under it), to a condition of analogy therewith, as insensate as the unresponsive turf: "to become a(s) sod."

14. Keats varying a line from Spenser in a letter to Shelley, 16 August 1820, Letters of John Keats, 2:322.

15. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Defence of Poetry," in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 487, 488.

16. See William Keach, Shelley's Style (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 186.

17. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 3.

18. In The Linguistic Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), J. Hillis Miller calls attention to one such verbal "moment," decentering and potentially deconstructive, which concerns the issue of translatability between languages in Browning's "The Englishman in Italy" (p. 207). Rupturing the apparent seamlessness of this English textual retrospect with the contractions and bucklings of another tongue, the mountain named "Vico Alvano" is compressed in transliteration--by both aphaeresis and synaloepha, the ellipsis of the first and the blurring of the second syllables--to become "Calvano." It functions thereby as a transegmental signal (characterized by Miller simply as a linguistic anomaly or shorthand) to keep us on linguistic alert in this poem of two cultures, two languages.

19. The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 9.

20. From a passage cited from Coleridge's Notebooks (without more specific reference) as epigraph to the first chapter of Geoffrey Hartman's Saving the Text (see Prologue, n.23).

21. Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and Valéry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966 [originally published in 1954]), p. 62.

22. See James Milroy, The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977).

23. Hopkins, "Lecture Notes: Poetry and Verse," in Journals and Papers, p. 289. break

24. See the opening of Chapter 6 below for a discussion of a comparable phrasing in the frontispiece from Hopkins.

25. Hopkins, "Lecture Notes: Rhetoric," in Journals and Papers, p. 268.

26. John Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York: Noonday Press, 1954), p. 81.

27. Helen Vendler, "Poets' Prose," New Yorker, 16 March 1987, p. 104.

28. This is Pound's definition of "logopoeia," in "How to Read," in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions), p. 25.

29. "All Sounds have been as music," in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963), p. 127.

30. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), p. 76.

31. In a three-paragraph article for Tyro, no. 1 (1921), called "The Lesson of Baudelaire," Eliot wrote that "Dadaism is a diagnosis of a disease of the French mind; whatever lesson we extract from it will not be directly applicable in London" (p. 4). The mythic force of the Thunder's enunciations in Eliot's poem of the next year represents everything Data parodistically degrades. The only critic I have found who notes a probable allusion (without cross-lexical biplay) to such French countercurrents at the close of The Waste Land, Grover Smith, comments briefly: "The fable of the Thunder with its thrice uttered 'Da' may have been invoked partly to get the kind of attention that French avant-garde activities were drawing; moreover there is a parable in it, a moral criticism, which they could well have taken to themselves" (Smith, The Waste Land [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983], p. 119). One wouldn't put it past Nabokov--whose character Hazel Shade in Pale Fire notices, among her other "mirror words," that T. S. Eliot spelled backward is "Toilest" (see notes to ll. 347-48)--to be hinting at the undertone of nonsense in Eliot's ponderous mythopoetic finale with his own stuttering cryptogram "pa data" (discussed in Chapter 2 above).

32. Marjorie Perloff, "The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties," The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 215. See also Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, ed., The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).

Unless otherwise noted, citations from the novels under discussion here are by chapter and page or by book, chapter, and page to the widely used Penguin paperbacks, except where Norton Critical editions are available, namely, for The Ambassadors, The Egoist, Hard Times, Heart of Darkness, Jane Eyre, Jude the Obscure, Middlemarch, and Wuthering Heights . Other editions cited continue

are Diana of the Crossways (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), Tristram Shandy (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), and the Vintage editions (New York: Random House) of novels by E. M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford.