Alan H's point about Pound and Italian influence may be right, and I agree
about the Yeatsian earlier intonations.
I've always thought that Yeats's intonation came partly from the pomposity
implicit in his era but also from his own accent and also, again, from a
notion he may have had of the chant as a semi-magical, vatic manner of
intonation. I remember talking once to V.C. Clinton-Baddeley ("Larry the Lamb"
on my childhood Uncle Mac radio programmes), whom Yeats preferred as reader of
his poetry on radio for he had a beautiful, sonorous voice. Clinton-Baddeley,
a very feisty gent of some 70 summers, had just started a brand-new career as
a detective story writer. He told me that he'd been on a country weekend with
Yeats once and the grand old man had paused dramatically on the lintel of the
cottage, saying: "I can't go in. I smell fairies!" C-B went in and found a
big bowl of mimosa on a table just on the other side of the window.
Is there much evidence about a "reading style" relating to the late 19th
century? I've heard a Tennyson recording which doesn't suggest that chanting
style so much as a slow, dignified lugubriousness whose actual nature is
difficult to guess owing to the poor quality of cylindrical recordings. I
have a dreadfully unclear and fragmentary recording of Oscar Wilde reading the
Ballad of Reading Gaol, in which, again, there doesn't seem to be a chanting
so much as a distinctively high-pitched, rather upper-crusty intonation, which
I'd call queenish if I dared.
Joyce, on the other hand, has a soft voice reading Finnegan's Wake, but makes
an inexorable pattern of sound as concatenating in its consonants as, say,
Rabindranath Tagore read in Bengali, of which I also have a tape, though not
unfortunately by Tagore himself.
Doug
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