From the godly Cynthia in Keats’s Endymion to the Polar Spirit and his fellow demons in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, from P.B. Shelley’s fairy in ‘Queen Mab’ to Francesca’s ghost in Byron’s ‘The Siege of Corinth’, Romantic poetry is populated – or rather haunted – by supernatural beings coming into contact and often conversing with humans. In doing so, earthly and unearthly interlocutors are faced with the pressing problem of how to communicate across the seemingly unbridgeable distance between their metaphysical dimensions. How can such distance be overcome and messages conveyed over the chasm separating different worlds? How can one effectively reach out to a being that is essentially other from them? And what does it mean to come into contact and commune with otherworldliness? These are some of the main questions that Romantic poets address in their depictions of supernatural encounters and that are at heart of my research.

My dissertation looks at communication with the Other World in the poetry of four major Romantic authors both within and without the traditional canon: Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Felicia Hemans. It is situated at the intersection of two recent critical trends – a renewed interest in the supernatural aspects of Romanticism on the one hand, Romantic media studies on the other – and focuses on the frequent and meaningful, though so far overlooked, intertwining of these two themes – otherworldliness and communication – in Romantic poems.

My research shows how, in Romantic representations, communication with the Other World acts as a magnifying glass that brings the challenges of ordinary communication in negotiating the gap between self and other to the extreme, providing illuminating insights on the authors’ views concerning the possibilities, modalities, and limits of communication. The Romantic period, which follows the eighteenth-century craze for conversation and precedes the advent of telegraphy and Spiritualism, proves a uniquely fascinating moment of transition in conceptualisations of communication, and poetry most suited to its exploration as a particularly important and problematic communicative medium of the time. Envisioning forms of contact across the gulf of Otherness turns out to be a way for the four poets under study to express their aspirations and anxieties about communicating at a distance and in non-informational ways but also about poetry itself, the otherness of its source and language, and how to communicate with an audience that was perceived as increasingly distant.

In order to account for the specific issues pertaining to poetical depictions of otherworldly communication, I have recourse to concepts from linguistics and communication theory (in particular, the multifaceted notion of phatic speech) and set them in dialogue with poetic and lyric theory. By doing so, and by simultaneously paying close attention to the formal aspects of the texts, I not only aim to outline new ways of applying communication theory to the study of poetry, but I will also show how poetry is not just passively illuminated by linguistics. Rather, the former often resists and problematises the assumptions and demands of the latter by portraying instances of communication with Otherness that elude its strict parameters and inhabit a suspended, ever-shifting domain of (im)possibilities only afforded by poetry.