On Christmas Eve 1906, the Canadian-American inventor Reginald Fessenden made the first transmission of speech and music by radio from his transmitter at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Using a high-frequency electrical alternator to produce a continuous wave rather than the spark-gap transmitters used for Morse code, Fessenden broadcast himself playing the violin, reading from the Bible, and singing Christmas carols to surprised shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic coast. This broadcast from Brant Rock demonstrated that radio could carry the human voice and music, not just telegraphic signals.

Fessenden's Christmas Eve broadcast, in which a human voice and music traveled invisibly through the air to reach isolated listeners at sea, created a new paradigm of literary transmission that would reshape twentieth-century poetry. The idea that a poem could be spoken and heard instantly across vast distances, without the mediation of print, fundamentally altered the relationship between poet and audience. This broadcast from a remote Massachusetts coastal station prefigured the radio poetry readings that would become central to literary culture in the mid-twentieth century, from the BBC's poetry broadcasts to the Dylan Thomas phenomenon.