The People's Microphone: Amplification and Circulation in Klopstock's Ode Der Grenzstein (1782)

Klopstock's poetry speaks to a groundbreaking shift from the rhetoric of amplificatio to a medial strategy of amplification. In written and printed communication, sender and receiver need not be co-present in the shared acoustic space of rhetoric. Klopstock avails himself of this qualitative extension of communicative channels in order to reach out to a broad, egalitarian audience. Informing his circulating texts with the emotive, conative, and performative properties of language crucial to rhetorical speech allows him to evoke a voice in the ears of his readers. That they can then lend their own voices to this voice lets the feedback of this amplificatory loop come full circle. For in receiving and emitting such a voice the audience does not simply become the loudspeaker of an authorial amplifier. Instead, Klopstock's odes pit their (lyrical) voice against their author-function in such a way as to turn the audience into senders as well as receivers. Thus, poetry becomes a people's microphone. The ode Der Grenzstein from 1782 marks the border lines such a concept of lyric must cross.