Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Shadows of Shadows passing... It is now 1831... and as always, I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations to which end, music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallour, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless.

When I began to write poetry, I knew I had found something so akin to music. Music and poetry are the oldest of human expressions-probably first music, then poetry. They complement each other and blend with each other to form a song. A song is powerful. It has the range of emotion music provides, and the power of ideas, images, memory associations, and speech governed by human intellect. Richard Wagner said something I found extraordinary. He said that the "reason for being of music is poetry." I wholeheartedly subscribe to that notion. At times, somewhere in my mind I hear the music of a poem long before the words come together.

Music is the exultation of Poetry. Both of them may excel apart but... are most excellent when they are joined.

The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem. The music is not the rhythm, which is a representation of life, alone. The music involves the interplay of the sounds of words, the length of the sequences, the keeping and breaking of rhythms, and the repetition and variation of syllables unrhymed and rhymed. It also involves the play of ideas and images.

Music and Poetry have ever been acknowledged Sisters, which walking hand in hand support each other; As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry. Both of them may excel apart, but sure they are most excellent when they are oined, because nothing is then wanting to either of their perfections.

Poetry is music for the human voice. Until you actually speak it or someone speaks it, it has not come into its own.

Poetry is the art that is closest to music, standing between music and narrative orality (which can be speechmaking, sermon or theater). Poetry is the voice of what can’t be spoken, the mode of truth-telling when meaning needs to rise above or skim below everyday language in shapes not discernible by the ordinary mind. It trumps the rhetoric of politicians. Poetry is prophetic by nature and not bound by time. Because of these qualities poetry carries grief, heartache, ecstasy, celebration, despair, or searing truth more directly than any other literary art form. It is ceremonial in nature. Poetry is a tool for disruption and creation and is necessary for generations of humans to know who they are and who they are becoming in the wave map of history. Without poetry, we lose our way.

…I engage with poetry musically. I think I hear the music of the poem before I put words to it. The poem comes to me as it were a song more than a string of words or images. If I can’t transport that musical quality to the poem, then the poem doesn’t exist for me…”

There is an inevitable connection between music and poetry.

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.

Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.