Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, is bigger Than any since the birthday of typography, A drowsy frowzy poem, call'd the `Excursion,' Writ in a manner which is my aversion. (Don Juan 3.94)(1) WHAT MIGHT WELL BE CALLED "APPLIED LANGAN." IN RESPONDING to Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel" I will do little more than place a frame around Langan's brilliant suggestion that "we need to unravel the Lay as an allegorical history of the transformation of poetry by the book--that is, by the print medium" (63). I will play out her meditations on the connection between blank verse and print by returning with her to the first blank verse in English, and then moving beyond Scott to Keats and Byron, closing with a brief discussion of the role of Coleridge in the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The heart of Langan's provocative reading of the Lay is a complex set of claims about the relationship between print and blank verse, the oral and the written, sound and silence: If the poem leaves untold the story of blank verse's origin, it suggests how blank verse--invented to translate the "dead letters" of Latin poetry into vernacular language--comes to define a literary vernacular that signals, evokes, or mediates, rather than records, the aural component of poetry. We fully understand the point of Scott's nostalgic evocation of an oral poetic tradition, in other words, only in recognizing how the print medium turns all verse into a blank and silent screen. (63) A dazzling extension from the seemingly "gratuitous appearance" of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey within the song of the fictional bard Fitztraver in Canto Six of the Lay enables Langan to seize the vision of his beloved Geraldine that the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa offers Surrey in Fitztraver's song as both a historical point de depart and a tour de force of a conclusion. If the "raptured line" of her beloved that "seemed her inmost soul to find" as Geraldine, alone in her midnight chamber, pensively reads, points to Surrey's contributions to the sonnet, as Scott's notes direct, Langan's bravura commentary points to "another singular contribution to the history of English literary forms: he is, we recall, usually considered to be the inventor of English blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter" (66).(2) To illustrate Surrey's "strange meter," as the original publisher, John Day, called it, the Norton Anthology fortuitously excerpts from his posthumously published translation of Book IV of the Aeneid fifty-odd lines from the episode of the hunt (Virgil's lines 129-68). The choice is apposite for Langan's argument, because the full passage, recording the fateful meeting of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, contains all the elements that her account associates with blank verse: secrecy, inwardness, mystery, and delusion, for if to Dido her Juno-contrived union with Aeneas is "wedlock" (52) it is, tragically, no such thing to Aeneas. Most pertinently, the spectacular romanticism of the scene joins to "lightning skies" (51) the sound effects on which Langan concentrates: the final paragraph of the excerpt begins, "In the meanwhile the heavens gan rumble sore" and ends with the marvelously resonant line: "And the nymphs wailed from the mountain's top" (43; 53).(3) An audiovisual hallucination indeed. The model for the blank verse of Scott's day was Milton's Paradise Lost, particularly the invocations, where Milton's speaking of himself descended through the introspective poetry of Akenside and Cowper to Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. The provenance suggests that Langan's pinpointing of a shift "around 1800" needs the supplement of a precursor. The prefatory note to Paradise Lost bears extensive citation: The measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre. …