"a poem without music is almost oxymoronic"
..it's hard to be truly original when there are no immediate precursors to spurn or deviate from. Without something to counter, the poet's "originality" is destined to resonate only within its creator. "The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad," Eliot pronounced, "it is, in the bad sense, 'subjective' with no relation to the world to which it appeals."..
You need a good ear to write verse, but only an average ear to appreciate it. And if you want to know the difference between a well-crafted poem and a mediocre one, Ezra Pounds's gentle reminder still serves: "LISTEN to the sound it makes."
Whereas Auden and Larkin hum and whistle in the mind, contemporary "verse" usually dribbles off into nothingness. It's presumptuous of me to say it, but I don't think our poets live for poetry as much as for the act of sharing their thoughts and feelings in the guise of poems. They're forgetting that poetry is a craft and a discipline before it is a reason to write about oneself...(to the atonal quality of contemporary verse.)
"What underlies all success in poetry," Lionel Trilling wrote, "what is even more important than the shape of the poem or its wit or its metaphor, is the poet's voice. It either gives us confidence in what is being said or it tells us that we do not need to listen; and it causes both the modulation and the living form of what is being said." The paradoxical thing about this voice is that it does not actually exist outside of our own heads. When we hear a poet's voice speaking from the page, we hear it internally: The tempo, the emphasis, the feelings are synthesized in us-which is why I prefer to read a poem rather than hear it read aloud (unless the reader happens to be Dylan Thomas, but even then it's a tossup). A poem speaking to me from the page is private and makes itself felt as no stranger's voice possibly could. In short, I have a relation with those words, which disappears when I hear them spoken..."
by Arthur Krystal
You need a good ear to write verse, but only an average ear to appreciate it. And if you want to know the difference between a well-crafted poem and a mediocre one, Ezra Pounds's gentle reminder still serves: "LISTEN to the sound it makes."
Whereas Auden and Larkin hum and whistle in the mind, contemporary "verse" usually dribbles off into nothingness. It's presumptuous of me to say it, but I don't think our poets live for poetry as much as for the act of sharing their thoughts and feelings in the guise of poems. They're forgetting that poetry is a craft and a discipline before it is a reason to write about oneself...(to the atonal quality of contemporary verse.)
"What underlies all success in poetry," Lionel Trilling wrote, "what is even more important than the shape of the poem or its wit or its metaphor, is the poet's voice. It either gives us confidence in what is being said or it tells us that we do not need to listen; and it causes both the modulation and the living form of what is being said." The paradoxical thing about this voice is that it does not actually exist outside of our own heads. When we hear a poet's voice speaking from the page, we hear it internally: The tempo, the emphasis, the feelings are synthesized in us-which is why I prefer to read a poem rather than hear it read aloud (unless the reader happens to be Dylan Thomas, but even then it's a tossup). A poem speaking to me from the page is private and makes itself felt as no stranger's voice possibly could. In short, I have a relation with those words, which disappears when I hear them spoken..."
by Arthur Krystal