Eternity and the productions of time

This dissertation focuses on a phenomenon that I call "musical description": poetic descriptions of music that self-consciously emulate the music they describe. I examine these descriptions in the work of three poets who in spite of their ideological and formal differences were all obsessed with the possibility of approaching a condition of music through description. My project explores what is at issue when poetry attempts to emulate the simultaneously orderly and chaotic effects that it attributes to music. Despite the time span of three and a half centuries that separates Dante's Commedia from Milton's Paradise Lost , Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton all wrote during an era when music was seen, paradoxically, both as the ordering principle of the world and as a chaotic force undermining meaning. To imitate music under these circumstances involves both great risks and great rewards: the possibility of acquiring the almost divine authority of heavenly song accompanies the possibility of losing control over the meaning of one's work. Dante manages to resolve this tension by daringly treating even the most problematic aspects of music as desirable under the proper conditions; but despite his attraction to Dante's treatment of music, Milton cannot come to a similar resolution---partly because of the legacy of the Reformation, but mostly because of the unsettling example of Shakespeare. While many scholars have dealt with Shakespeare's treatment of the subject of music, or with his incorporation of songs into his plays, none has recognized his extensive use of musical description, his persistent attempts to blur distinctions between music and the poetry surrounding it. Shakespeare's plays use descriptions of music to draw attention to their own "musicality"---their tonal instability and their haunting promises to provide transcendent truths that never quite emerge. Throughout his career, Milton associates the Shakespearean both with an almost nonreferential kind of language that in its sheer beauty acts as instrumental music does, and also with complex descriptions of music, as if in these descriptions Milton saw the verbal reaching towards the nonverbal.