Demystifying Poetry
What is poetry anyway? Watch the video if you want to know my answer, which probably won’t be what you were expecting…
Let me talk for a moment about songs. Most songs get their effect from the combination of words and music. If you just take the words by themselves, they often don’t seem to have much meaning. The atmosphere comes largely from the music. Poets have to create atmosphere without any music to help them. Looking at it that way, a poem is a bit like a pop song, but without any music.
That’s what makes poetry special. But it also means that poetry, like a great song, is there for our pleasure — not something we should agonise over. As the American poet William Carlos Williams put it: “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.” (Some people have tried to tell me that’s apocryphal and he never really said it, but he said it all right! He said it to an assembled audience at Harvard in 1951. You can listen to it here.)
Let’s throw anxiety out of the window and start looking at poetry with the same mindset as when we listen to music — as something to experience, rather than something to analyse.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Just to get into the mood, listen to this:
How does that make you feel? Does it demystify Shakespeare’s sonnet for you? I’d love to hear your reactions in the comments!
Let’s try another one, the first canto of Shelley’s Ode to Autumn:
It’s not really about whether you like heavy metal, or reggae. It’s about changing the way you relate to the poem, changing the way you feel about it. Again, let me know what you think in the comments.
TRY IT YOURSELF!
Take a poem you know, or one you’re trying to study, and think about how it might work as a song. I played around with several ideas before hitting on the musical genres for these two. The lighthearted reggae melodies seemed to suit the Shakespeare sonnet, and the heavy metal, seguing into rap, captured some of the raw energy of Shelley’s poem.
RELATED
While I’m on the subject, I’d also love you to listen to David Gilmour (of the Pink Floyd) singing a rather lovely version of Sonnet 18. Perhaps you know of other settings of poetry to music – some successful, others perhaps less so. Let me know of any you think are particularly good – or bad! Thinking about why a particular musical setting fits or doesn’t fit a given poem is really just another way of coming to appreciate the atmosphere of the poem. And – as promised – it’s fun!
JOURNEY THROUGH POETRY IN BOOK FORM
I love making videos, but I still think we grasp things more deeply when we see them written down, so I’ve made the series into a digital book, so you can follow it that way as well.
7 Comments
“If you can’t get pleasure from a poem, then it isn’t a poem for you.”
How freeing! I bet more people would dive into poetry if they heard that.
I’m so glad you mentioned and linked David Gilmour’s Sonnet 18 in your comment on the relationship of poetry to music. Now that’s definitely a poem/song for me! I’ll be listening to it regularly.
If you like that, I’m sure you’ll love this: https://youtu.be/2DAdWcsM7Po?feature=shared. I used to teach this in conjunction with Shelley’s “To a Skylark”, and “Bringing sounds of yesterday into this city room” recalls Wordsworth’s “But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din / Of towns and cities…” in “Tintern Abbey”.
You are bringing great music into my life. “Grantchester Meadows” is now on my saved songs playlist along with Gilmour’s “Sonnet 18.” I really appreciate all I’m learning from your videos. Thank you for being so generous in your responses, too.
Hi Professor, thank you so much for starting this series! The beginning of the video was absolutely hilarious 😄 Your point on the difference nowadays between poetry and songs made me think about Ancient Greek poetry. If I remember well, some kinds of poetry such as lyrical poetry was sung in Ancient Greek. I remember learning about the Seikilos epitaph and finding it remarkable. But as you said now poets generally work with words only – the music is in the words themselves. I was wondering if you knew when the shift occurred from using arranged words with music and calling it poetry to, nowadays, refering to poetry as the arrangement of words only while refering to words+music as songs. I’d be very curious to know what you think about it. Thank you!
Great question – and almost impossible to answer! The relationship of poetry to music goes back thousands of years, and still continues today. As you probably know, the word “lyric” (as in “lyric poetry”) derives from the musical instrument the lyre. Poetry accompanied by the lyre was popular in ancient Greece, in medieval Italy and France, and in other regions at other times.
I’m going to admit to not being an expert in this field, but my understanding of the use of the lyre to accompany poetry is that it was more a style of delivery, not quite the same thing as a “song”. The medieval troubadours of southern France and northern Italy are reckoned to have had several hundred melodies at their disposal, and poems and melodies could be “mixed and matched”. They weren’t completely interchangeable – the melodies that could be used would depend on the precise metrical structure of the poem in question – but there wasn’t (as I understand it) a one-to-one correlation of a particular melody with a particular poem in the way that the words “She loves you yeah yeah yeah” correlate with the music.
The word “sonnet” also means “little song” (“sonetto” in Italian), and the sonnet as a poetic form developed from musical origins.
And there are many other ways in which poetry and music have been intimately related. A fair bit of the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century (works by George Herbert, Thomas Ken, John Bunyan, etc.) is best remembered today in the form of sung hymns in church services. And William Blake would no doubt be somewhat surprised to know that his poem “Jerusalem” – written from a very different viewpoint from that of the Church of England – is now a popular hymn!
The 20th century saw the emergence of jazz poetry – basically poetry recited against a background of jazz music. And in the 1970s I went to performances by Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah of what has come to be called “dub poetry”.
In that sense, the relationship between poetry and music never ended. Here is David Gilmour (of the Pink Floyd) singing a musical arrangement of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Osse7w9fs. And some song lyrics, as I say in the video, can stand up on their own, without the music.
As you can see, in the video I’m trying to encourage people to think of poetry as a kind of song without music, in the sense that the words can stand alone and be appreciated for their own sake. Seeing it from that point of view, some songs *are* poems, just as some poems have been made into songs. It’s this quality of words being able to engage us and move us that I want to focus on here. Rather than the difference between poetry and music, I’m aiming to get across the idea that if we can approach poetry in the same kind of way as we approach a pop song – as something to enjoy for its own sake – we have a better chance of coming to appreciate it.
Thank you for your question – it’s been very thought-provoking figuring out how to answer it!
@anosensei Thank you so much for this thorough answer! I’ve learnt so much about the intertwined history of poetry and music. I’m looking forward to your next videos
@sempksemp Coming up soon – but I’ve got several other commitments over the next few days…