UCLA

This study introduces a critical and creative discourse about the interdisciplinary connections between lyric poetry and music through the lens of three poets and three composers whose distinct art forms come together in three unique collections of art songs. Beginning with an analysis of selected works by poets Emily Dickinson and William Blake, I show how an attention to the semantic, sonic, and visual details of their poems reveals an underlying musical poetics that locates meaning in temporal perception and performance. Dickinson’s poems feature fascinating metric modulations, phonetic patterning, and motivic development that put linguistic meaning into musical motion, while Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience posits the concept of words set to an invisible music, navigating a central thematic duality that extends to the aural patterns of closely related pairs of poems. Visually, Dickinson’s manuscripts reveal experimentation with spatial relationships between words, while Blake’s intricately crafted illuminated prints embed his poems in contrasting illustrative worlds, reflecting their mutual understanding of the poem as a transitional process rather than merely a static object. Following this literary analysis, I turn to selections from two 20th-century song cycles based on these poets’ works: Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson and Benjamin Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. Examining how the composers have read the poets and placed their words within the musical syntax of counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, and texture introduces the idea of a song as a realization and extension of a poem’s musicality. Furthermore, the form of each cycle embraces a “lyric” perspective that prioritizes the perceptual details of each poem’s language and unsettles the reading of a definite, overarching narrative throughline. Finally, I outline my recent collaborative endeavor with composer Benjamin T. Martin on a new song cycle based on some of my own poetry – I See and Unsee: Five Memory Songs – by contextualizing the interactive genesis and formal shape of the work. Ultimately, attention to the multivalent conversation between these artistic works and domains yields a more dynamic and ecological understanding of the creative process as an evolving, intertextual continuum.