The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Read Online Free PDF

different conventional structures and forms that poets impose on themselves carry meaning—epics, elegies, and odes may signal history, mourning, and love. Traditionally poetry has been discussed in terms of these forms (rhyming patterns, metrical patterns, number of lines). Sonnets were for love. Epics suited couplets. Dirges were for misery.
    I’ve been writing songs all my life, but my friends who are real songwriters tell me that while my melodies are strong, my lyrics are not. I think of myself as a verbal person, so the irony of this is clear to me. I have to confess that for most of my life I never engaged much with poetry, and didn’t really understand it, in spite of having taken a course in it in college in the 1970s. About ten years ago, my friend Michael Brook (a composer of instrumentals and film scores) suggested that if I wanted to make my lyric writing better, I should read poetry.
    The next day, coincidentally, I ran into my old poetry professor, I’ll call him Lee, on campus where—following a most unlikely path through the music industry—I had become a professor myself. We went for coffee together and I told him of my desire to become a better lyricist. I asked him to explain how poetry and song lyrics differ. Once again, I found I was asking the wrong question!
    “Lyrics are poetry,” Lee explained. “They are two varieties of the same thing. The lyrics of popular songs are only a particular kind of poetry. You seem to believe there exists an absolute distinction between the two, and there doesn’t. Lyric poetry has been around since the beginnings.” Lee mentioned the treasure trove of medieval and Elizabethan lyrics—the poems/songs of Campion, Sydney, Shakespeare (and Schubert’s “Who Is Sylvia?”, for example, and other lieder). He pointed out that it is not uncommon for written poetry to be later rendered into song, as in Jonson’s “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” or Burns’s poems or William Bolcom’s music-making with Blake and Roethke.
    This sentiment was echoed more recently by John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, and himself a respected poet. In defending poetry not of the ivory tower sort, he writes:
    People who care about their poetry often experience genuine feelings of embarrassment, even revulsion, when confronted with cowboy poetry, rap and hip-hop, and children’s poetry. . . . Their readerly sensibilities are offended. (If the writing gives them any pleasure, it is a guilty pleasure.) The fact that Wallace McRae, Tupac Shakur, and Jack Prelutsky wrote these works for large, devoted audiences simply adds insult to the injury. Somewhat defensively, the serious poetry crowd dismisses such work as verse, not poetry, and generally acts so as to avoid it, if at all possible, in the future. . . . The result is a poetry world of broad divides.
     
    Of course song lyrics do have something that conventional poems don’t—the melody, the mannequin on which Sting was saying he had hung his lyrical clothes. That is, most poems, by definition, have to convey an emotional message through some combination of rhyme, meter (the way the sounds are organized in time, including their accent structure), metaphor, and verbal imagery that add up to great beauty of expression. They also must convey a sense of movement—a forward, rhythmic momentum all their own. Song lyrics may do all these things, but they don’t have to. They always have the music there to help them along, melodies and harmonies that can provide accent structures, forward motion, and a kind of harmonic-textual context. In other words, lyrics are not intended to stand alone (and as to the words of poems, to quote another Sting lyric, “they dance alone”).
    Lee and I met once a week for that academic term. He brought in some of his favorite written poetry; I brought in my favorite popular music lyrics (which he never failed to remind me were also poetry). I came to see that, whatever its form, written