" Mr. Arthur Symons
has recently said: "`Christabel' is composed like music;
you might set at the side of each section, especially of the opening,
`largo vivacissimo', and as the general expressive signature, `tempo rubato'."
Tennyson realized the musical effect of "Paradise Lost"
when he spoke of Milton as "England's God-gifted organ-voice";
and he himself in such lyrics as those in the "Princess"
and the eighty-sixth canto of "In Memoriam" wrought musical effects
with verse. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton says of Poe's "Ulalume" that,
if properly intoned, "it would produce something like the same effect
upon a listener knowing no word of English that it produces upon us."
It needs to be said, in parenthesis, that in all these cases,
while there is the musical effect from the standpoint of time and tone-color,
there is still the perfection of speech. The theory will not hold, however,
in much dramatic verse, or in meditative blank verse, as used by Wordsworth.
Much of the poetry of Byron, Browning, Keats, and Shakespeare,
while supremely great from the standpoint of color, or dramatic power,
or picturesqueness, or thought, is not musical. To bring some poems
within the limit of musical notation would be impossible.
While then one must modify Lanier's theory, the book emphasizes a point that
needs constantly to be emphasized, both by poets and by students of poetry.
Followed too closely by minor poets, it will tend to develop
artisans rather than artists.
Pages:
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317