Abstract: This article examines the tight yet ambiguous relationship between poetic writing and orality in poetry of the first half of the nineteenth century. In these historically turbulent times, the personal voice of the poet was invested with a revelatory energy that was intended to either transcend its age or gather. The fragmenting and circulation of these oral works created a fundamental tension at the heart of these poetical texts: the link to a vanishing “origin” and the subsequent variants of the original “song.”
