A model of scholarship that is not just convincing but a pleasure to read, The Celestial Twins argues that the best poetry has always been invigorated by music. Dante's poetry, for example, emerged from the tradition of the troubadour and Italian vernacular songs, although his stanzas enabled him to slow the action and add story to song--thus literal singing is replaced by "a verbal music that constantly carries with it hints of actual melody." Milton took poetry so far from music that he sentenced several generations of English poets to cautious, flat verse and a hysteria of pretended feeling, but Wordsworth took this " toned-down Miltonic blank verse" and added "new stops and voices to it until it could peal out . . .in an organ blast of Romantic sublimity." More recently, African American poets related to the jazz, blues, and gospel traditions. Kirby-Smith (English, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro; The Origins of Free Verse) backs his elegant argument with the equivalent of a library's worth of detail; for public and academic collections.

                                                                  --David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee.