H.T. Kirby-Smith has just robbed me of five days while I read through The Celestial Twins: Poetry and Music through the Ages. The book is terrific--what a compendium of knowledge--Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Renaissance, Jacobean, French Classicism and French Symboliste texts. Step by step, trustworthy guide that he is, he shows us how poetry moved from Greek mousike to Latin accentual, moving away from musical accompaniment in the most advanced periods of western civilization (Virgil, for instance), then moved back to assimilate with dance and music and hymn in the Middle Ages, then--with the recapture of classical learning in the Renaissance--back into its own sphere in Italy in the 14th, France in the 15th, and England in the early 16th centuries. He shows us the importance of the Protestant Reformation on the hymn form, the spoken voice in Wyatt as an accentual line was grafted onto a smoother Italianate line. He shows the glory of Milton, the importance of Burns and Blake in echoing the older ballad tradition, the lyrical breakthroughs of the Romantics, the way music played or did not play in three representative poets--Hardy, Yeats, and Langston Hughes.
    The man is always enlightening in giving us readings of representative poets, and then showing how the "music" of the poems reinforced what was being said. He has convinced me once and for all that the constant talk through the ages about musical analogues are mostly just that--analogues or metaphors--poetry having long ago found its own music apart from anything like a musical setting. And yet we continue to hear a ghost music--Beethoven's Quartets in Eliot's Four Quartets, the old ballads in Hardy's poems, etc.

--Paul Mariani, Professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, and The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane
 
 

    It is with considerable pleasure that I can report an enthusiastically favorable response to this book. I learned a great deal from it, and what was not new to me I found I agreed with--at least 99% of the time. It does a good job of demonstrating its main thesis, that over a long period of Western history, poetry has several times emerged from a musical context and developed independently to acquire purely verbal qualities that are "musical" mainly by analogy. Yet it also suggests that poetry is enriched and refreshed by its occasional contact with tonal music, or even by a tenuous memory of that contact. Although others have observed that music and poetry in England separated in the Middle Ages. Kirby-Smith makes an important contribution by showing how this separation has occurred several times in European history. He is able to show that just as the imposition of Greek meters on Latin freed Latin verse from music, the imposition of Romance verse in Chaucer and Wyatt freed English verse from music.
    Many other features of the book contribute to its success. Its range is vast--from the ancient Greeks to T. S. Eliot--but though it is ambitious, it succeeds by not trying to be exhaustive. Kirby-Smith gives suggestive pointers from time to time toward areas that are beyond his scope but which the reader might explore on his own. He carries a lot of learning very lightly.
    I should like especially to praise the author for his blessed clarity. The general is nicely balanced by the specific: representative individual poems get excellent readings, and in many instances, excellent translations. The book is well informed. but is not theory ridden; instead of foggy jargon, we have genial common sense and graceful and witty prose. He is able to season the most technical and scholarly discussion of rhyme with comparisons to limericks and Tom Lehrer's songs. Speaking of how the Romans forced Latin verse into Greek quantitative meters, he writes (p. 23): "Aeneas made his way from the ruins of the Hellenic world bearing on his back a quantitative Anchises."
    His comments are always flavored by a genuine engagement with the poems, and his responses, whether of enthusiasm, amusement, or distaste, are so honest that the reader must respect them even when he disagrees. (My own taste and Kirby-Smith's jibe almost all the time.) While literary scholars and critics can learn from this book, the general reader of poetry will not feel excluded.

--Edward Doughtie, Professor of English, Rice University, author of English Renaissance Song