The Lullaby Is The Spell

There Is No Objection To The Proposal: In Order To Learn To Be A Poet, I Shall Try To Write A Sonnet. But The Thing You Must Try To Write, When You Do So, Is A Real Sonnet, And Not A Practice Sonnet.

At Four Lines, With The Quatrain, We Reach The Basic Stanza Form Familiar From A Whole Range Of English Poetic Practice. This Is The Length Of The Ballad Stanza, The Verse Of A Hymn, And Innumerable Other Kinds Of Verse.

The Composer Does Not Want The Self-sufficiency Of A Richly Complex Text: He Or She Wants To Feel That The Text Is Something In Need Of Musical Setting.

The Voice Is Raised, And That Is Where Poetry Begins. And Even Today, In The Prolonged Aftermath Of Modernism, In Places Where "open Form" Or Free Verse Is The Orthodoxy, You Will Find A Memory Of That Raising Of The Voice In The Term "heightened Speech".

Modernism In Other Arts Brought Extreme Difficulty. In Poetry, The Characteristic Difficulty Imported Under The Name Of Modernism Was Obscurity. But Obscurity Could Just As Easily Be A Quality Of Metrical As Of Free Verse.