Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
want of hearing others speak, it is next to impossible that [a deaf person] should have that knowledge of quantity and rhyme which is essential to harmonious verse.”46However, after pronouncing his personal disqualifications as a poet, Kitto provides specimens of his own verse to demonstrate his attempt at “the tuneful art” (1.171). Kitto suggests that “[i]f the reader can discover the formal errors—the bad rhymes—the halting, hopping, stumping feet—which I am unable to detect, then my proposition is demonstrated; but if he can make no such discoveries, it must then be admitted with some qualification” (1.171). While Kitto’s compositions provide evidence of his poetic ability, his preface exposes his anxieties about writing in a genre that he believed required the ability to hear. Kitto’s strange vacillation between proclaiming the impossibility of a deaf poet and publishing his own poetry reflects the complicated position inhabited by a nineteenth-century deaf poet writing in English.
Kitto, like all other nineteenth-century poets, whether hearing or deaf, was facing a cultural definition of poetry that was inextricably linked to orality, especially in terms of formal features including rhythm and rhyme. Kitto was not the only deaf poet who felt ambivalent about participating in a genre tied to sound and speech. About a dozen American and British deaf poets, who used signed languages or fingerspelling to communicate, published one or more volumes of writing during the Victorian period. These deaf poets often acknowledged that their position was contradictory in a cultural environment that invested poetry with a special relationship to aurality and orality. This chapter addresses how these deaf poets balanced cultural beliefs about the primacy of sound to poetry with their own desire to sever hearing ability from poetic ability. By considering both the formal conservatism and the thematic radicalism of their constructions of sound in poetry, I argue that these poets capitalized on the tensions between sound, writing, and deafness. Nineteenth-century deaf poets ambivalently maintained an idea of “vocality” in their poetry while underscoring how that imagined “voice” was a silent construct of print. This chapter, then, also explores what this tension in deaf poetry can reveal about wider nineteenth-century perceptions of the relationship between sound and poetry. Finally, I also contend that deaf poetry became a political tool: the perceived gap between deafness and poetic ability was exploited by deaf people, and their allies, in their fight to defend sign language use.
The poets I examine in this chapter were all involved with this unique genre of deaf poetry. They constitute what I propose is the canon of nineteenth-century deaf poetry in English, which spans the 1830s to the 1890s. Despite the diversity of their class, gender, national, racial, educational, audiological, and historical experiences, these poets shared a concern that their deafness might preclude poetic achievement.47Early deaf poets such as Kitto (1804–1854) and American poets James Nack (1809–1879) and John Burnet (1808–1874) did not have deaf forebears to validate their desire to write poetry. However, as the century wore on, gains were made in deaf education and more deaf people read, wrote, and published poetry. For example, British poet William Henry Simpson (dates unknown) published a book of his own poetry to correct Kitto’s “erroneous impression” that deaf people could not write poetry.48Later American poets including Amos Draper (1845–1917), Mary Toles Peet (1836–1901), Laura Redden Searing (1840–1923), Angie Fuller Fischer (1841–1925), and John Carlin (1813–1891) were involved to different degrees with the National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, D.C. They would have been familiar not only with the work of earlier deaf poets such as Burnet, Nack, and Kitto but also with their published and unpublished peers at the college. In fact, as E. M. Gallaudet, the leading American educator of deaf people, noted, “[a]mong the students of the College for Deaf-Mutes at Washington, compositions in verse are not uncommon.”49In a lengthy 1884 article for Harper’s magazine on the “Poetry of the Deaf,” Gallaudet asserts that despite cultural skepticism about deaf poetic ability, “the deaf, in no inconsiderable numbers, have essayed to mount on the wing of poetic expression.”50In this article, Gallaudet collected the work of many of these poets to refute Kitto and validate deaf poetic achievement.
Poetry was a valued element of nineteenth-century deaf culture in both Britain and North America. Important events in the deaf community, including deaf school graduations, for instance, were often commemorated with occasional poems written and signed by pupils. Furthermore, the vast network of periodicals created by and for deaf people in Britain and North America, including the widely circulated American deaf school newspapers known as the “Little Paper Family,”51published poetry by deaf writers in monthly poetry columns. Nineteenth-century deaf poetry culture was deeply transatlantic and therefore provides an example of the value of employing a wider geographical lens, one that transcends national boundaries, when examining deaf history. The print culture of deaf periodicals was transatlantically entwined, and North American and British periodicals habitually responded to, and reprinted, articles and poetry from each others’ journals. H. B. Beale, one of the members of the editorial staff of The British Deaf-Mute in the 1890s, so frequently published his poetry in the journal that the editor began calling him “our own poet.”52But Beale’s poetry also appeared beyond his own journal; the American periodical The Silent Worker also regularly published Beale’s work and featured him in a full-page story, titled “H. B. Beale: Deaf Poet and Journalist of Great Britain.”53This mutual transatlantic interest extended to books and other pamphlets that addressed the lives of deaf people in the nineteenth century. For instance, both Manchester missionary Ernest Abraham’s A Chat about the Deaf and Dumb and headmaster of the Midland Deaf and Dumb Institution W. R. Roe’s Poems on the Deaf and Dumb reprint poetry written and published by deaf Americans, without noting their nationality. There were, of course, also significant national differences in these deaf poetry cultures. For instance, the existence of the National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, D.C., fomented a strong deaf literary culture, including the establishment of literary societies. Indeed, many of the published American deaf poets were tied in some way to the institution, whether as students or as teachers, and the presence of this locus of American deaf culture (which did not have a British counterpart) may explain why many more American deaf people published books of poetry than British deaf people did. Nevertheless, through avenues such as British deaf periodicals and books such as Abraham’s and Roe’s, even this American poetry circulated widely in British deaf culture.
While deaf poets garnered attention and respect in British and North American deaf communities, they nevertheless understood that they faced a cultural definition of poetry that was rooted in orality. Searing, for example, wrote about hearing audiences’ preconceptions about deaf poets, most notably in her prose-poem “The Realm of Singing: An Autobiographical Allegory.”54The allegory of the work concerns a bird whose “crippled” wings prevent her from ascending the “tree of poetry” in the “Realm of Singing.” Searing invokes the oral connotations of poetry in naming this world the “Realm of Singing.” However, Searing also explicitly decouples the bird’s physical disability from its ability to sing. That is, the bird’s crippled wings are as unrelated to poetry as is the deafness of the poet in this “autobiographical allegory.” While the “crippled” bird can sing, her wings prevent her from climbing the “tree of poetry” and thereby gaining recognition:
“I think I can sing a little,” she said, and so she hopped painfully upon the very lowest twig and began:
How shall a bird on a crippled wing
Ever get up into the sky?
Is it not better to cease to sing—
To droop and to die?
There are so many before me there,
With songs so loud and long and sweet,
They startle the passer unaware—
I am at his feet!
And though I sing with a quivering breast
And a dewy eye and a swelling throat;
My heart so close to the thorn is pressed,
That I spoil each note.
And if ever I sing a song,
Sweet of the sweet and true of the true—
All of it’s drowned by the birds ere long,
Up in the blue.