Location: Literary Responses ot Mind and Music in Eighteenth-Century Drama, Operatic Workings of the Mind, Music Department, Oxford University

In 1769 Webb’s Observations on the Correspondence Between Music and Poetry proposed that both music and poetry aroused emotion through a coincidence of acoustic and sentimental movements: the abrupt, smooth, growing and diminishing movements of a melody or a poem were, in Webb’s eyes, directly analogous to the internal movements of an audience’s passions. In Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, or Milton’s Paradise Lost, expansive verse lines thus awake (and emblematize) pride, while sudden shifts in tone plunge an auditor into melancholy.  This paper outlines Webb’s theories before demonstrating how they might furnish twenty-first century critics with a new approach to eighteenth-century artworks that brought music and speech together.