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It has a kind of built-in music of its own.” Ashbery isn’t so dictatorial, but said, simply, “my poetry doesn’t need music. I, for one, shudder to think what Helmut Lachenmann might do to The Waste Land. Eliot forbade anyone to set their poems to music. To some poets (and their readers), the poem should remain inviolate. Who am I to presume to take this finished object and do something to it? What am I doing? I’m not even quite sure what I’m doing. Rorem once said, “Tennyson, I think, said, composers are simply making me do the same thing twice, and Valéry said that a song is like looking at a painting through a stained-glass window.”Īll of my life, all of it to this very day from the beginning when I began writing songs, I have a slight feeling, not so much of guilt, but of presumption. Poet John Ashbery and composer Ned Rorem, who has set Ashbery texts, differ profoundly on whether poems ought to be set to music. Poetry and music may have a long-term relationship, but it’s certainly not without its bumps. Beyond that, there’s this: In 1999, the American Composers Orchestra reported that, “According to Michael Hovland’s Musical Settings of American Poets, the poetry of Walt Whitman has been set to music 539 times.” Readers, critics, theorists, and translators have all had their way with Whitman’s work. Kinnell offered a long, well-reasoned argument for his approach, closing with Whitman’s own words not long before his death: “In the long run the world will do what it pleases with the book.” Kinnell chose to read “this remark as indicating acceptance” of his approach, but the statement can surely also be read as resigned recognition of the facts.

Whitman may be poetry’s most spectacular victim of the law of elapsed time. Most readers who look closely at Whitman’s revisions soon realize that while some may help, most do not, and many harm the poems, often severely. In editing The Essential Whitman, Kinnell opted against choosing the final version of Whitman’s poems for his book, arguing that “Song of Myself” did not reach final form until twenty-six years after first publication. He made several poems of one poem, one poem of several.

Whitman took passages from one poem and put them in another. Walt Whitman was famous for revising his own poems. To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds

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