The Music of Poetry and the Poetry of Music: Artistic Interface on the Space-Time Continuum

Abstract

The intriguing relationship between music and poetry on the tenuous space-time continuum is analogous to the inextricable fusion between sense and sensibility; between feeling and emotion; between what is heard and what is intuitively felt; between orchestrated sound and versified silence. Poetry is a creative recollection of fleeting and intractable emotions, while music is the acoustic articulation of poetic intuitions in space and time. The putative primeval music of the spheres finds eloquent expression in planetary motion which, in turn, exerts creative afflatus on the poetic sensibility. That ageless lunar man, eternal Muse of innumerable romantic rhymes, is one sure evidence of the perpetual planetary pull on artistic creativity. Thus, the poet and the musician are fellow travellers in cerebral flight on the shared wings of creative imagination. If, as Walter Pater contends, all art aspires to the condition of music, poetry is perhaps the singular art with the inherent capacity to attain that sublime transcendentalism in intuitive communication of which music is thought to be the supreme model. The consequence is a rare artistic collaboration between two ancient arts which have regulated the human emotion and its immanent social barometer from time immemorial. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to explore this unique artistic interface on the space-time continuum, from historical and critical perspectives, with broad classical and contemporary points of reference for this universal collaboration in artistic creativity. For instance, here is the very basis of Richard Wagner's operatic art which intricately welds music, poetry, and drama into one inextricable creative pageant. The paper rounds off on the current collaboration between the present author (a Nigerian poet) and African American composer, Wallace Cheatham, which offers us 11 transcontinental poet-musician partnership with increasing prospects of mutual artistic fulfilment, and remarkable contributions to the growing global corpora of lyrical poetry and the resultant inspired musical compositions.