The Hollow Sea: Soundings in Eighteenth-Century Marine Poetics

Abstract In this essay, I explore how oceanic sounds were imagined and put to work in English poetry of the long eighteenth century. Despite the status of the sea as a subject for poetry, and the associations between liquid and poetic sound, the sea was recurrently cast as a hostile environment for poetry, as well as for human voices and ears. Drawing on sound and media studies alongside classical receptions, I identify one particular trope that served both to characterize and to combat the desolateness of the sea: the marine hollow. Combining water, air, stone, wood, shell, and more, and defined by some apparent lack or gap in matter, hollows raise questions about materiality that intersect with the matter-traversing qualities of sound, and the media-traversing qualities of poetry. Through readings of hollow seas, shells, ships, voices, and caves in authors including Dryden, Pope, Coleridge, and Byron, the essay maps out some key places and aspects of the hollow. I propose that the marine hollow is animated by a central dialectic between poverty and plenitude, a dialectic that has wider implications for critical work on eighteenth-century oceans.