Reading Between the Lameds: Unsound Words and Gothic Music in Smart's Psalm CXIX

Abstract: Intended for practical use in the Anglican liturgy but even more deeply invested in their physical status as a book, Smart's 1765 Psalms of David invert the private, ecstatically spiritualized stylizations of Jubilate Agno . Smart's strange and compulsive rendering of Psalm CXIX explores the limits of the earlier poem's engagements with the echoic potential of the phoneme, confining the sound that it exalts to the material and specifically typographical space thereby shown to generate it. I argue that this technique echoes the sonic architecture of Horace Walpole's exactly contemporary Castle of Otranto , linking Smart's Psalm CXIX to the acousmatic pretenses that became a signature of gothic literary form.