How important is music to your poetry?
Technically, it is the central quality of my work, and one of the aspects of poetry that distinguishes it from prose and makes a poem great rather than good (or lousy). Music is what we mean when we talk about a poet’s ear. I understand that not all or even most poets have actual musical training, but the best, trained or not, have an instinctual ability to find the musical reality of language. I do have musical training, and classical music is, along with poetry, one of the two main passions of my life. So I feel hypersensitive to the music inherent in “the best words in the best order,” to cite that famous Coleridge bon mot. As readers we tend to notice music most when it is overdone, as it is in many of Poe’s poems. But unconsciously it is there at work in any great poem, and usually when a reader comments that a poem is “beautiful” that is what they are responding to.
No comments:
Post a Comment