This chapter argues that the nocturne poem, a quintessential genre of the 1890s, attunes itself to the decade’s changing relationship between the human and the natural, the aesthetic and the artificial, with some poets representing an urban, bright, smoky night sky and others presenting visions that blur city lights and starlight, or surreal representations of forests. This chapter approaches the nocturne as a transnational genre, treating British poets Mathilde Blind and Arthur Symons, alongside E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), an Indigenous Canadian poet, and Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who launched his career writing poetry in English in San Francisco in the 1890s. Noguchi and Johnson both play into European stereotypes that writers of color offer a premodern mystique; yet both also resist that stereotype by fully engaging with the artistic and poetic trends of the 1890s in their nocturnes and by offering alternative visions of modernity. The nocturne illuminates how transnational poets understood the night sky in the wake of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels.

Scholars of French music have long known the name Vladimir Jankélévitch, but it is only in recent years that he has captured the attention of musicologists more generally. This is due almost entirely to the efforts of Carolyn Abbate, whose much-debated 2004 essay “Music – Drastic or Gnostic?” gives Jankélévitch pride of place.1 A year before that essay, Abbate had published a translation of Jankélévitch’s 1961 book Music and the Ineffable, which was the focus of a special session at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and a subsequent colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.