The Sound of Poets

 We know what poets sound like, don't we? They speak in Received Pronunciation, sometimes in a curiously strangulated form – think T.S. Eliot – or in a kind of Oxford drawl, like Philip Larkin, or in the fruitier-than-fruit tones of Dylan Thomas, or in a more relaxed version of 'posh', like Betjeman. Regional accents are allowed for Northerners – Ted Hughes (the thinking man's Sean Bean), Simon Armitage, all those Liverpudlians. But there was a time, before Received Pronunciation took over (largely thanks to the BBC), when writers, like everyone else except some members of the gentry and aristocracy, spoke in a range of provincial accents, and the world sounded very different, both from how it sounds now and from how it sounds in period dramas and historical reconstructions.
Tennyson, by all accounts, spoke with quite a broad Lincolnshire accent all his life, though he could modify it according to circumstances. He loved Lincolnshire dialect, and wrote many dialect poems (though not as many as the dialect poetry specialist William Barnes of Dorset). Johnson spoke with the accent of his native Staffordshire, and was sometimes mocked for it, good-humouredly, by his friend Garrick. Shakespeare, another great son of Mercia, no doubt spoke with a Warwickshire accent, but what exactly he sounded like we shall never know. As for Keats, how 'cockney' was he? Did he sound like a Londoner or not? Controversy rages, in a small way. In one of many hostile contemporary reviews, he was accused of using 'Cockney rhymes', such as 'thorns' and 'fawns', 'shorter' with 'water' and 'fastens' with 'parsons'. This, according to linguists, is evidence of 'nonrhoticity', the tendency to drop Rs from the end of syllables and words – though such rhymes are perfectly respectable, and have been used by poets blessed with abundant rhoticity. Keats's letters feature such usages as 'ax' for 'ask', 'ave' for 'have' and 'werry' for 'very', but these are surely there for comic effect. The likelihood is that Keats, with his intense sensitivity and easily embarrassed nature, would have adapted whatever accent he had to suit any particular social situation he found himself in. Of course we shall never know – but we do, as it happens, have some idea of what Tennyson sounded like, from a wax cylinder recording made in 1890, in which the elderly poet declaims 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. It's an eerie sound, made all the more eerie in this 'virtual reading'...