Hear Here: A Homophone in English Poetry

Abstract

The words hear and here sound but do not look the same, and in this essay I investigate the significance of this fact in poems by Lovelace, Shelley, Keats, Christina Rossetti, Baraka, and Graham. The hear/here homophone raises a number of abiding questions about the relation of the visible and acoustic in the reading of verse, as well as about where the poem exists. I also examine how the relation between the scripted 'here' of the page and what the reader may be said to hear (or not) has been mobilized for ethical, theological, and political purposes.