It is spring, and listening to the birds singing outside my window I have been thinking about music lately, about the connection between poetry and music. It is often said that poetry is the music of words. They both share common elements of rhythm and rhyme, lyrical and musical phrases, verses, cadence, repetition, meter, and general structure. The forms intersect with each other in many ways.
The link between poetry and music goes back thousands of years to man’s earliest beginnings. In ancient Greece, poems were often sung. To perform epic poems such as Homer’s “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey,” a poet would have to sing the poem in sections over the course of several days. The lyric poets performed their work to the accompaniment of the lyre. The ancient Greeks identified Apollo as the God of poetry and music. His temple was considered the center of the universe. This tells us how important poetry and music were in the ancient world. The oldest anthology of Chinese poetry was a collection of songs. In the middle ages, the troubadour poets were popular and highly influential, and their lyrical work influenced European poetry for centuries. The ballad form continues to be commonly used for both poems and songs. Emily Dickinson wrote poems to the rhythms and forms of church hymns, and many poets such as WH Auden and Edna Saint Vincent Millay, have written highly successful opera libretti.
Today, poets still use the forms and rhythms of varied musical traditions, from jazz and rap, to folk songs and country music. The relationship between these two intertwined art forms is dynamic and continuing.
Much poetry can be sung as music or transferred into musical form. I recently heard the British-Irish folk rock band “The Waterboys” singing poems written by William Butler Yeats. They had taken the famous poet’s work and put it to rock music. His words were sung/spoken with their wild instrumental accompaniment. Very creative! Many other modern musicians and singers are taking poems by current poets and setting these to their own music. A lot of poets today write poems with the intent of singing them to an audience, or setting them to music. Poetry, after all, is a spoken word art form meant to be heard in sound. This is especially true if you write rhyming poems. But even prose poems are often more powerful when read out loud. This is why poets do public readings.
On the reverse side, the lyrics of many songs can be considered poetry. I think of someone like Leonard Cohen, who started out as a poet publishing at least four books of verse before he decided to become a musician. Then he wrote the lyrics to his own songs and released them as albums and CD’s. His music lyrics read like his poems.
A number of singers have written very poetic lyrics for their songs. For example, look up such "oldies but goodies" as the words to Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” or his “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” or Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” or any of Pink’s song lyrics. The singer Lukas Graham has some great heartfelt lyrics as well. Some people start out as poets then turn into music lyricists, others start out as music lyricists and turn into poets. Poems have inspired songs and songs have inspired poems.
Poetry is generally considered a literary art form based on a sophisticated skill and use with words. It emphasizes the use of language to evoke emotion. And music is about composing notes and sounds for instruments and voice. The emphasis is on the expression of emotion through sound. The purists among us may prefer to enjoy our art forms separately; some people also feel that crossing the lines between poetry and music dilutes the strength of each. I admit to seeing that point of view as well. I’m not sure how well Shakespeare’s beautiful language could be transferred into a musical or song lyrics. That probably wouldn’t work out. But today, with so many art forms crossing and mixing genres, the lines between them aren’t so clear. And what makes a poem great may have a lot to do with its musical rhythmic quality, even as what makes a song lyric great may relate to how well the language is used (metaphors, imagery, alliteration, etc.).
Both poetry and music are emotional art forms of expression. It’s the feelings they stir in us that makes them so powerful. Many consider music to be the most emotional form of communication. Sound often reaches people’s hearts more than anything else. This may be why sad songs touch us so deeply. Poetry shares a lot of this same emotional effect. Perhaps Leonard Cohen said it best when he said, “Music is the emotional life of most people.”
So, the next time you read a favorite poem, perhaps something like Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” think how the words might sound if they were put to music. And the next time you listen to your favorite song with lyrics, think about how the words might sound if read aloud as a poem. You may find there is less difference between the two art forms than many of us imagine.
Here are some good reference sources I used while researching this blog:
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