The Aeolian Harp as staged in European Poetry and Novel
The Aeolian harp, starting to be built from the 17th century, is characterized by the singularity of its sounds which determine its narrative and poetic uses. Becoming an important topos of sentimentality, memory, melancholy and death, it becomes a means of seduction in Smollett, a fundamental tone of nature for German romanticism, an image of poetic inspiration for a Coleridge.