Having produced during her lifetime what Glenn T. Dibert-Himes once estimated to be over thirteen-hundred works (170), Letitia Elizabeth Landon was both immensely popular and lambasted by critics for her sloppiness, repetition, and pandering to the developing mass of British middle class readers. L. E. L., one contemporary critic snidely wrote, “is a mere machine wound up by the clock-work of rhythm” (as cited by Vincent, 27). Current scholarship has more often than not followed suit: Glennis Stephenson’s Letitia Landon (1995) portrays a poet who “constructed the conventionally female poetic self of L. E. L.,” a poetess who is bound by social prohibitions to write on love and whose feelings “are immediately spewed out upon the page” (15, 10).

An engine of verse, she deployed the repetitive contrivances of feeling, for some readers, ad nauseam. In her essay, “On the Ancient and Modern Influence of Poetry,” Landon explicitly denies having become a Stepford wife of nineteenth-century poetry, writing “vain will be the effort to regulate mankind like machinery” (Selected 164). She implicitly argues for a different type of technology, “the hazel rod pointed by the hand of truth” (Selected 164) that will find the hidden fountains of future poetry. While metaphors of divine inspiration uncovering the liquid depths of poetic feeling may be nothing new, it is Landon’s interest in previous forms of technology—the hazel rod, the lute, and the lyre—that reveals her poetry’s mediated complexity.

No stranger to the colloquy among audio and visual media during the Romantic period, Landon was one of the queens of the annuals, almost single-handedly writing Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-book for seven years (1832-1839). She often received engravings for these volumes and then wrote poems to accompany them.

What Nicholas Mason titles her “visual turn” consisted not only in her keen interest in art but also in a series of portraits commissioned as a marketing ploy to bolster L. E. L.-mania when it began to flag in the mid-1820s (104). Landon’s poems often juxtapose engravings, narrative, songs, and musical settings within poems or among volumes. Dibert-Himes once called these “multimedia presentations,” but Landon’s repetitive cultural mediations move beyond the agon between the sister arts into a layered, dynamic method of “remediation,” what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book describe as “the representation of one medium in another” (45). While Remediation (2000) made a pervasive mark on media theory fifteen years ago, scholars including N. Katherine Hayles have updated the relation among media through concepts of “intermediation” and “intermediality.”

Even more recently, Jussi Parrika in What is Media Archaeology? (2012) argues that remediation is an “intuitively good way” to investigate intermedial relations over time, both through scholarship and within art itself (137). While we could easily read Landon’s attention to voice and art through the lens of mode, genre, ekphrasis, or the special concerns in women’s writing with the sister arts, a media-theoretical approach allows us to see and most fully explore the poet’s distinctive play with sound and noise—indeed, with the questions of new media as they were unfolding in the early-nineteenth century.

Landon’s attention to the “early music” of Sappho and the troubadours would seem to channel unmediated feeling, what Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, associated with the most potent and simple emotions at the beginnings of language, and what Celeste Langan has called the “outmoded medium of the poem” (50). Langan summarizes this position in her discussion of Sir Walter Scott: “the same way that oral history projects like Scott’s Minstrelsy attempt to fix and preserve the vanishing traces of folk expression, so (written) lyric comes to be seen as an attempt to arrest the semiotic babble and rapid evanishments of emotion” (50). She suggests that written poetry silences the medium’s auditory mellifluence in favor of the “musical scene of the poem,” allowing the reader a virtual playground for audio-visual hallucinations. Erik Simpson, writing of British minstrelsy in the Romantic period similarly explains Landon’s attention to the troubadour/minstrel as a “fantasy of poetry being produced under the immediate influence of strong emotion and directed to an identifiable audience,” which evokes the “intimate connection between poet and listener in packaged texts of many layers [. . .] [that] acknowledge the loss of this fantasy” (18, 19). Both Langan and Simpson posit a hallucination or fantasy instigated by the audio-visual terrain of the song. Landon’s poems differently construct a notion of media in excess of either the nostalgic playback of primitive songs for women’s easy listening pleasure

or the fantasy of interiority that evokes virtual sensory landscapes. Her poetic representation of early aural media supplies a series of remediations—a hypermediated excess—that moves beyond nostalgia, fantasy, and the construction of a performative, abyssally self-conscious subject. Rather, Landon highlights the manifold ways that a modern listener might hack into older songs collected on the page. Her poet-singers collect various moments of singing technology and enact them to compare, negotiate, and temporarily embody them. The page becomes an occasion (and not the only one) for archiving, reprocessing, and reproducing anew the visual, the textual, the verbal, and the aural.

Landon begins her polyphonic composition with The Improvisatrice, her first published volume and perhaps her greatest commercial success. She sets the poem ostensibly in the past, yet the timeless guitar-toting, Florentine performer evokes a flexible historicity that signals a versatile channeling of minstrelsy for modern purposes.

The narrative depicts the eponymous, unnamed tragic figure who meets Lorenzo at a party, falls in love with him, and then becomes lovesick after stumbling upon his wedding to another. Although Lorenzo eventually proclaims his love to her, she nevertheless dies only to be memorialized by a portrait and an urn installed in Lorenzo’s home. Such a narrative has given rise to readings of the improvisatrice as a nostalgic figure for narrative romance and the minstrel, whose songs become conventional when the singer lives her sung tragedy.

This allegedly driving narrative of the improvisatrice’s love becomes nearly secondary to the remediated art housed within the poem—the numerous descriptions of her paintings and inset songs that compose close to 40% of the poem.

The poem begins by stacking several in quick succession: two paintings done by the improvisatrice, both of struggling minstrels, are followed by eight inset poems, a painting of a tragic Ariadne, and the poem ends with the description of the improvisatrice’s portrait next to her urn. The poems themselves are wide ranging, highlighting our minstrel’s potent talents that, similar to Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Madame de Staël’s Corinne, wane as her seemingly unrequited love intensifies. We hear “Sappho’s Song,” “A Moorish Romance,” “The Charmed Cup,” “The Hindoo Girl’s Song,” “The Indian Bride,” “Song,” “Leades and Cydippe,” and “Lorenzo’s History.”

We can make a few observations about the poem’s texture that exemplifies Landon’s handling of media as more than an ironic and self-fulfilling performance of tragic, sentimental femininity. The poem promotes a veneer of affective and poetic immediacy that it nevertheless undercuts in several ways. The individual paintings and inset poems at first seem to express unmediated emotional experience. Her first resort to song occurs as she ends the description of her second painting, of course, a painting of a minstrel: “I deemed, that of lyre, life, and love / She was a long, last farewell taking;— / That from her pale and parched lips, / Her latest, wildest song was breaking.” She then commences “Sappho’s Song,” singing, “Farewell, my lute!—and would that I / Had never waked thy burning chords! / Poison has been upon thy sigh / And fever has breathed in thy words” (10).

The emotional portrait of the minstrel nearly jumps off the page and into song. As Bolter and Grusin suggest of remediation, the poem presents an interface “that erases itself, so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium” (24). The plot seems to propel the reader from one palpable song and emotional crisis to the next. Nevertheless, the series of songs that shuttles readers back and forth from narrative to song proper effectively dispels the supposed immediacy of the improvisatrice’s overarching narrative as well as the supposedly direct, emotional message of her individual performances. These ruptures between poem and song become more intense and distracting as the poem continues. The improvisatrice’s steadily accumulating boxed set of greatest hits appears to trump the narrative, and rather than immediacy, their excess provides a sense of hypermediation, what Bolter and Grusin describe as a fragmentation and heterogeneity that emphasizes performance and process rather than a transparent, finished art object (54-55).

This heterogeneity is nowhere more apparent than in the improvisatrice’s continual references to lyres and lutes, a repetition which increasingly encourages the reader to understand the supposed youth and naiveté of the ingénue performer as already mediated by an obsession with an older media—not just one but various iterations of the defunct singer. Her paintings of the minstrel with the lyre as well as Sappho’s song remediate Grecian performers who used that U-shaped instrument. She does not merely imitate Sappho’s form but modernizes Sappho’s voice through Sicilian or heroic quatrains (abab iambic tetrameter). The improvisatrice most often plays a lute, an instrument whose long history evokes a number of different versions of the early guitar most likely transmitted from the East to Europe via Moorish Spain during the Crusades.

While the lute’s popularity rose through medieval troubadour music and perhaps accompanied some medieval romance narratives, in the early modern period it became the most common household instrument and a featured part of British court music. It then waned from use by the early- to mid-eighteenth century, not to revive again until the turn of the twentieth. This makes the lute-playing improvisatrice herself most likely not a contemporary figure, yet we cannot easily idealize the improvisatrice’s songs into generic lute songs. Rather, she channels different examples of minstrels, bards, singers, poets, and performers through her set list. After the Grecian “Sappho’s Song,” we have two mini-medieval romance narratives, “A Moorish Romance” and “The Charmed Cup.” These two evoke the fashion for romance plots of crossed lovers, eastern tales, and pagan magic. The “The Hindoo Girl’s Song” and “The Indian Bride” are both sung by our heroine at a masked ball, and while they may be related to first-person poems of female alterity and sensibility (including Felicia Hemans’s Records of Woman [1828] or even William Wordsworth’s “The Forsaken Indian Woman”), they even more powerfully allude to the non-Western provenance of the lute and the eastern traditions of female singing that were beginning to infiltrate other Romantic-era texts such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Alastor” (1816).

Through these inset poems, the improvisatrice collects, resurrects, modernizes, and perhaps scrambles multiple song forms including Greek lyric, European medieval romance, South Asian song, and early modern Italian court and folk music.

Landon’s long poem The Vow of the Peacock represents a late effort to tackle these problems once again in what F. J. Sypher describes as “a curious return on the part of Landon to a poetic genre that was by 1835 clearly outmoded and unprofitable” (10). While Sypher argues that the nostalgia for her youthful success spurred the volume, the poet’s revisiting verse narrative likewise represents her rethinking techniques of remediation—especially since the poem’s narrative is, before it even reaches the page, already twice remediated. She takes her subject from Daniel Maclise’s painting of the same name, which itself was inspired by a line from Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805).

This poem plays off romance narrative—the bulk of the story tells of Knight Leoni’s vow to win Cyprus back for Queen Irene, ending in his success and their marriage—but it engages a frame that multiplies the visual, textual, and aural remediations.

At its start, Landon inserts visual metaphors to frame and flatten the poem so that the diachronically told inset songs and tales can be read more synchronically. The opening lines of the poem begin by constructing a contrast between present and past, with each of the first three stanzas starting with the exclamation, “THE present!” and the fourth with “The past!” In her first critique of the present, she inveighs, “I love it not—it taketh its birth / Too near to the dull and common earth” (3). This remark might surprise typical readers of Landon because the speaker protests against sorrows that are “so fresh” and “so near.” The speaker is “[t]oo near” to the “common earth” and to the “sweat of the brow”; the materiality of feeling’s embodied, phenomenological presence lies too “heavy” (3). Here Landon markedly distances herself from the immediacy of both the present moment and the intense feelings that characterize her earlier verse. The past, as one might expect of Landon’s infatuation with knights, maidens, and troubadours, provides a better world. She writes, “It softens the present, and flings / A grace, like the ivy, wherever it clings” (4). Poetry, Landon suggests, can put a box around feelings, compartmentalizing and distancing us from the harsh realities of the present, as a building is picturesquely framed with ivy. The poet accordingly “calls up the shadows of ages long fled” and “[s]hades and softens the world-worn, the harsh and the mean” (6). This description is not simply a sloppy metaphorical bait and switch but Landon’s multimedia thinking about how the visual qualities of the printed poem might remediate past music.

Landon’s almost vertiginous, repetitive mediations, however, may require something beyond media archaeology’s retro-futuristic approach, a different form of analysis that can take us an even greater distance from historically mediated sound and noise. Digital tools that amass word frequencies and collocations might help to make sense of narrative repetition that, to our ears, sounds like sentimental static. Machine-assisted reading, moreover, helps to raise questions about how noise might frame productive, alternate readings and reframe Landon’s poems at large. Stephen Ramsay, in his manifesto Reading Machines: Toward An Algorithmic Criticism (2011), traces the advent of smaller scale, algorithmic reading from the legacy of Oulipo and deformance, experiments that disrupt our perceptions of the text and open up suggestive gaps encouraging new theories and narratives to emerge.

Such counting and filtering methods present a rich way to encounter Landon if only because there may be no better way to assess the supposed repetition within and among Landon’s poems than an “unsupervised” computer algorithm.

Just as Landon’s own versification appears slapdash and mechanistic, these computational operations that seem effortless and rapid are, however, the result of hours of painstaking programming. Both offer the rapid transmission of copious data, which the reader can then encounter and interpret anew via visual remediation in word clouds, frequency charts, and force graphs. These tools can definitively show us where the obvious repetition in Landon’s work lies—no small feat. But this final remediation of poem and song—the digitization of poem data and the new narrative interpretations they suggest—becomes a part of what Ramsay calls “the larger document space within which it is already implicated” (80). My digital methodology in this part of the paper does not seek to propose a single argumentative strand but, rather, is meant to offer an initial range of tools and their visualizations, a heterogeneous set of observations aimed at provoking close reading and other textual sensitivities by studying word density, frequency, and proximity. It is as if the unclosed frame of The Vow of the Peacock continues with data visualizations as one more modern, mashed-up version of the various minstrel songs. These visualizations intensify Landon’s focus on the colliding categories of poetry, song, music, sound, and textual noise.

Figures 1-4 present several word clouds, or representations of the words most frequently used in Landon’s eleven volumes, Hemans’s poems, Scott’s poems, and Byron’s poems:

These visualizations of word frequency data are weighted so that the largest words represent those with the highest frequencies.

Aside from comparative observations about individual words, one way to contextualize these frequencies is to look at Voyant’s data about lexical density. Landon’s two volumes discussed here are lower than volumes by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hemans, Scott, and Charlotte Smith:

The Improvisatrice: 126.6

The Vow of the Peacock: 133.7

Hemans’s Records of Woman: 148.9

Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary: 170.9

Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads: 180.5

Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel: 201.7

Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets: 212.5

[Chart of lexical density (total words divided by unique words x 100).]

Since her poems have fewer unique words (using the same words more often), we might assume they have less intellectual density. But Ramsay’s discussion of lexical richness among American novelists should give us pause, when he reminds us that William Faulkner’s A Light in August (1932) is exceedingly less vocabulary rich than many other novels of its time (71-73). Perhaps Landon’s word choice may not be a repetitive dumbing down but the signal of her poem’s historical flexibility, hybridity, and modernity. The mashup of old and new songs may be enabled by a fluid and easily processing form (couplets and heroic quatrains). This operating language includes word choices (diction) that tend toward monosyllabic nouns and simple adjectives that will not fade from use—modern in their succinctness, concision, and directness of expression.