--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