What can poetry learn from music? Not about surface lyricism, but at the deeper levels of form, of their relationship to time – Eliot writes in ‘Burnt Norton’: ‘Words move, music moves/Only in time’ – and the structuring power of the human breath as a way of making sense?
My guest in this programme is exceptionally well placed to consider this question. Fiona Sampson initially trained as a classical violinist before changing tack in her early twenties to pursue a literary path. She has gone on to be an award-winning poet, as well as an editor, critic and translator of poetry.
Her recent books include a fascinating study of landscape and place, Limestone Country, a biography of Mary Shelley, and the work that provided the starting point for our conversation, Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form (available in paperback and as an e-book from Edinburgh University Press).
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of part of our conversation in which we consider the importance of breath as a structuring unit for the poet and musician.
hedgehog & fox
It’s very interesting you mention the oral nature of poetry. You quote Basil Bunting in the book saying ‘poetry lies dead on the page until some voice brings it to life’. Now that’s very definitely true about music and the score. Do you agree that it’s true of poetry as well or is the analogy imperfect?
Fiona sampson
I think the analogy is actually pretty perfect, because I think we read chronologically, even when we read in silence to ourselves. And I also think that when we read a poem properly – I mean when we’re actually concentrating on reading it and enjoying it – we read it, as I say to my students, ‘out loud in your own head’. So we read it, as it were, sonically as well as semantically.
In the history of poetry, writing poems down is a comparatively recent development; as we know, much of form developed as a mnemonic. So the primary life of a poem is to me its oral, but also denotative, life. Writing it down is purely transcription, purely a record.
hedgehog & fox
Although we can go back and reread in a way that’s harder with music. We can, as it were, walk round the poem and consider it as a whole, step back…
Fiona sampson
We can, but I think that a poem happens in one direction actually, and I think that one can go back and read passages in a novel too. And indeed people do if they have favourite novels that they read over and over. Also of course if you’re a musician, you go through a piece of music backwards and you do little bits – ‘Let’s go from letter E again’ – and there are a particular passages that you like and particular passages that you practise more.
In fact you do have this passing through, going to and fro, and going back. It works just in the same way as a poem, because of course you know since you can read music and play music, it’s fully accessible to you in the way that words on the page are to people who have literacy.
hedgehog & fox
So to pursue this breath idea a little bit further, what do you think that opens up in terms of insights for the poet? Because the direction of travel of the book is taking insights or things which are embedded in music and thinking, how can I bring this to bear on poetry? You say in the book one point, I think,’poets might well attend to musicians’ or ‘pay attention to musicians’. What sort of insights do you think that’s opening up here in the case of breath?
Fiona sampson
I think that we underestimate breath as a fundamental building block, which is both oral – I mean, can be heard and recognised even if not consciously, so it’s a strategic thing – and as a musical – you see, there I am using that word ‘music’ to mean ‘shapely’, as a shaping building block. So it’s almost as though, in writing a poem without being conscious of the fundamental units of breath, it’s like thinking of an architect but not understanding about foundations. It just seems to me absolutely foundational.
A good example would be enjambment, that lovely push-me, pull-you of a phrase across a line break, where the grammatical phrase goes across, and the visual phrase – and sometimes the musical phrase because sometimes there’s a rhyme at the line end – doesn’t go across, and so there’s a kind of a micro-pause, a kind of flexing, a lovely heightening of the significance of the space between the word at the end of the line and the word in the next line, a kind of elasticity in language. And actually what’s going on there is the work of breath.
And we tend make it rather like gardening, with kind of topiary. It’s in a way a question of technique and of understanding of the nature of language. We are only using part of its capacity. We’re only using the grammatical and the repetitive resonant. It’s a kind of thinning of the experience.
hedgehog & fox
You’re emphasising the non-denotative aspects of poetry. But how do you deal with the denotative aspects? How do you incorporate, recuperate that unavoidable difference between music and how poetry, at least to most readers, seems to be operating, which is primarily by denoting something in the world or in the imagination?
Fiona sampson
Well absolutely, it is, isn’t it? And that’s why in a way ultimately a poem is arguably more complex than music, because it I think it has to do all the work the music does and then do the work of language too.
So sometimes there’s an overlap. So, for example, one of the things that I was also thinking about was abstract form, proportion really that comes down to. An obvious one is the golden section, you know, the tipping point in a sonnet. Now that’s in a strict form sonnet, which most sonnets are, though not all. Obviously that’s metrical. But it’s also denotative. There’s a kind of out and a return. There’s a question and then a response in the final six: out for eight lines and back for six. And that is a deep form, an abstract form prior to language, but it is created by the denotative aspects of language.
Chromaticism too, the sense of a message being beautifully ‘slurred’ by the kind of ‘give’ of colour, which might, for example, mean using words or images that have a resonance we know from a canonical text, or there’sa second meaning, a punning meaning or whatever. Or simply that they are quite an extraordinary metaphor. All those things that are chromaticism bring in that ‘othering’ of the kind of straightforward musical or linguistic-grammatical ‘I told you so’. Chromaticism again is a musical element, but it is enacted by the denotative in language.
hedgehog & fox
In a second part of the book you talk about spheres where words and music come together and you quote Ian Bostridge the singer as saying, talking about Lieder, German art song: ‘What matters is that the song is saying something, not what it’s saying’.
And I wanted to get you to comment on that and ask you whether you fundamentally believe that, because you’ve been talking about how you think maybe poetry is a more realised or a richer or more complex form than the music. But there he is suggesting that once a poem has done it’s work, it could be replaced by any set of syllables if the affect is there in the music.
Fiona sampson
Yes, it is a huge problem isn’t it, because it is actually of course true that quite often when one goes particularly to hear Lieder – not quite so much with opera because largely you know the narrative thrust even if there aren’t surtitles – with Lieder you often don’t know phrase by phrase, particularly if it’s not in English, what it’s saying. And you may not know even if it’s in English, because of the distortions of singing and because a musical setting creates its own reality and sometimes you just can’t hear through the piano texture or whatever.
And all of those things mean that the words in a song do different work from what they did before they were set. And I think that is something that poets struggle with and I struggle with it myself because, you know, is it enough for the poem to have been so terrific that it triggered a wonderful composer into producing something else terrific? Well yes, on one level. But on another level, what presumably the composer thought he was doing was, if not enhancing, then at least paying homage to or re-presenting the poem.
So I think it is problematic. Because I think it’s certainly true, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m of the generation that grew up with poor quality music reproduction, so very often I couldn’t hear the words of songs, including even pop songs, I largely don’t know what they say, that I’m used to the notion of a kind of highly intentional-sounding voice but no notion of what they’re saying, but partly it must be that too.
I think that’s it’s quite easy to say, as most posts do, and I agree, the difference between a poem and a song lyric is that the poem is free standing and the song lyric can’t be. It’s perfectly worthy, but it’s part of a whole, like the left hand only of a piano piece. You know, fine.
But what do you do when it’s Schubert setting really major German Romantic poets or indeed Britten setting Auden or the Lyke-Wake Dirge or anything else that’s wonderful and complete.
hedgehog & fox
I noticed in the book, which must have gone to press or must have been written before the Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Bob Dylan, a slight side-swipe at the frequency of nominations of Dylan for the Nobel Prize. So in the light of what you’re saying: take away the music, and Dylan isn’t a poet and isn’t writing poetry?
Fiona sampson
No, for me.
hedgehog & fox
So it is just that you don’t think he’s a particularly good writer or that you think that any songwriter should not be eligible for the Nobel Prize?
Fiona sampson
I think that songs are a musical form, they’re not a literary form. Libretti are sometimes literary, but I think if you’re going to have a Nobel Prize for literature go to song, what’s to stop it going to film, where very obviously so many amazing things come in as well as the words?
I certainly don’t think Dylan is a poet. I mean one isn’t allowed to say this because the hegemony I’m sorry to say of white male baby boomers, who scream down abuse on social media, for example, when you say things like that. But why can’t there be differences? Why why can’t he be a singer songwriter, which is what he describes himself as? Why do we have to pretend he’s something else? He’s not a filmmaker either. He’s not a dancer. He’s what he is. Why this urge to pretend that he’s something else as well? He’s not.