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Responding (rather late) to your question about the sound of poets (past), Lawrence, yes, this has occasionally bothered me; I think I tend to assume that the "deep" sound is the same and quickly dismiss any basic doubts that have arisen. I feel a resistance to any continuing concern about the point, a resistance possibly caused by deep uneasiness. Hearing on the 3rd Programme what Bunting had to say about the impossibility of "sudrons" (?or southrons?) really hearing Wordsworth, for example, and his actual reading of selected poems by W.W., excited and confused me many years ago. I am no wiser now. I can only offer this: when we read poetry we usually hear it internally in a way that is more open to phonetic variations than our actual speaking voice. I can "hear" Scots poetry, for example, better than I can read it aloud, when I tend to sound like the drunken Glaswegian next door when as a young married I was living in a Southampton council flat yonks ago. But the point remains: Wordsworth is a different experience spoken with a Northumberland accent, though Bunting's version may also have been phonetically doubtful. When I'm reading Hölderlin, I try to hear a Swabian swish and lilt, though I cannot reproduce it with my speaking voice. The implication is that we must develop a geo-historical phonetic awareness for the adequate appreciation of poetry, even if this is an impossible ideal, parallel to historically informed (geo-)political, aesthetic etc awareness. I wonder if Erminia has a very exact idea about the sound of, say, Cavalcanti. (I hesitate to call up Beatrice from the vasty deep or wherever.) Does William Herbert have an idea about Henryson's historical sound? Are these vain thoughts? Cheers, Martin %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%