Sound as Sense

It has often been claimed that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. The general distrust of methods that combine or aggregate knowledge from different research fields, and therefore tend to elide or smooth out some of their particularities, may account for the paucity of critical writing dealing not only with the role of voice and song in poetry but also with the history of the interdependencies of verbal, textual and musical materials in the broader context of contemporary American literature.

The purpose of this book is to develop an informed and imaginative understanding of the interrelationships between poetry and music in a way that reflects the diversity and richness of contemporary artistic practice in the US since the beginning of the 20th century. Related topics such as theories of representation, the aesthetics of rhythm, the material production of literature and music, the links between poetry, politics and popular culture, the making of music from literary texts, or literature from musical models, all provide the focus for a study that deals with the theoretical and practical interrelationships between poetry and music.