“Sir, what is poetry?”
“Why Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”
—Samuel Johnson, from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
Although Dr. Johnson’s right — poetry’s slippery to define — we can say it’s the form of writing closest to music: what’s most important in poetry isn’t plot, character, or setting, but sound and voice. As soon as that’s said, you can think of poems that don’t sound musical at all. (You can even think of some music that doesn’t seem musical.) And in both cases, readers and listeners won’t agree on their specific examples: John Cage; hip-hop? De gustibus non est disputandum, the Latin to my ears more musical than “There is no disputing about taste.”
All poets love music, lean on it and learn from it, whether it’s Bach or the Beatles or Jacques Brel. I used to play the piano (not well, but often, at the cocktail hour), and recently submitted, successfully, to an operation on my right hand so I could play again. My fingers had curled up from an inherited condition called Dupuytren’s Contracture. I like the name, pronounced “dePWEEtrens conTRACture” — a double amphibrach. Every vocation has its own language, and in poetry an amphibrach is a three-syllable “foot,” or metrical unit, with the middle syllable accented, as in limericks: “TheLEGend ofLARry the LIZard / isCHAMpionSUper andWIZard” are the opening lines of a charming unknown work about a musical band of lizards, all much more talented than I am on the piano, told in a sequence of 40 limericks (“clean limericks”: these days almost an oxymoron).
Some poets, perhaps to gather a little internal rhythmic capital, compose their poems while listening to music, though their choices are often surprising. Hart Crane liked writing to the thumping strains of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, pacing about his room as he did so. Today Boléro would just be distracting, familiar as the background music during Bo Derek and Dudley Moore’s love scenes in 10 (the ensuing sales of Boléro making the composer’s descendants very rich, too late for Ravel himself; it has always been thus).
Poetry began in song, and abandons it at its own peril. For centuries, poets have been fond of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music. In 1687 John Dryden, Poet Laureate of England, wrote his famous “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” written to be accompanied by music, and beginning, “From harmony, from heavenly harmony / This universal frame began.” In a magical partnership, the music for it was written by England’s greatest composer at the time, Henry Purcell. (A bit later, Paul Simon’s “Cecilia” was a big hit in the 1970s.) Music and words together can slide through our hearts like a penknife through a peach; it’s a common experience, after a poetry reading, to feel you’ve been deeply stirred (not shaken), but can’t quite remember why.
Music isn’t everything in a poem, of course. A good poem requires sense as well as sound. W. H. Auden said that Alfred Lord Tennyson “had the finest ear of any English poet, but was also the stupidest,” perhaps channeling George Bernard Shaw, who claimed that Tennyson “had the brains of a third-rate policeman.” It can be nasty up there, where the air is thin.
Still, it’s endearing to imagine the young Hart Crane, escaping to New York from priggish Ohio and, bursting with inspiration and Cutty Sark, leaping up from his table as the tuba solo from Boléro kicks in, leaning over to write the beginning of his great saga about the Brooklyn Bridge looming just outside his window, and farther down in New York Harbor the magnificent Statue of Liberty, arm upraised, welcoming this small-town boy to a strange new world where anything could happen.
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay water Liberty —
—from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, Doubleday Anchor Books (NY 1958)
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2014.