As far as I know, every culture that is especially well-known for both poetry and art music has a major genre where well-known literary poetry is set to music- except for one.
In Arabic, Persian, and Turkish music, in Chinese music and so many traditional musics influenced by it, much of the music is classic poetry set to music and turned into song.
The Germany of Beethoven has the German lieder tradition.
The one exception is the English-language world.
English has a great tradition of poetry.
Wordsworth. Coleridge. Robert Frost. Emily Dickenson.
The English-speaking world has given us The Beatles.
Jimi Hendrix. Brian Wilson. Cream. Jefferson Airplane.
All with lyrics in English.
And yet try to find a musical setting of classic English-language poetry.
There is only one that I could find. And that is the lovely old musical setting of 'Drink to me with thine eyes' by the great Ben Johnson.
What gives?
Why do we not set classic English poems to music like the Turks do classic Turkish poetry, or the Germans?
I have figured it out.
The English-speaking world did not have artistically ambitious art music with lyrics until the folkie movement of the 1960's.
Modern jazz is instrumental.
But after World War I, the modern world decided that poetry is obselete.
Sure, we still do poetry.
But we don't do poetry to be poetry.
We do poetry to be social protest.
We do poetry to be an intellectual experiment.
But we don't do poetry to be beautiful and tell stories or describe things.
We don't do poetry to be poetry.
T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Theodore Roethke were perhaps the last major literary figures in English, outside of song lyrics and perhaps a little bit in the beat movement, to write poetry as poetry.
And so by the time the 1960's came along, poetry was obselete in the modern world.
We don't do poetry to be poetry, to be beautiful and carry soaring feelings.
And so real poetry, poetry to be poetry, was considered to be from a bygone age.
Theodore Roethke's poetry certainly feels like it comes from a bygone age! Though it was written in the mid-20th Century, it feels more like something from Wordsworth's time perhaps, or Emily Dickenson's time!
And the music of the 1960's and the rest of the late 20th Century from America, Canada and Britain was meant to feel contemporary.
So we simply wrote our own lyrics.
Sure, the beat movement of the 1950's wrote its own poetry, and perhaps even some that was meant to be poetry and not just social protest.
But Bob Dylan and John Lennon wrote words at least as good as any of the beat poets of the 50's.
And they did not have to write lyrics that were not meant to be real poetry, since they were writing song lyrics after all!
If they wanted to write pretty words and not ugly words, they could get away with it, for it was only song lyrics after all!
If the best contemporary lyrics could match or exceed the beat poets of the 50's, and that does not mean that the beat poets were not good (for we're talking Bob Dylan and John Lennon lyrics here), then we might as well just write our own lyrics!
Especially as so many of the songwriters of the 60's and 70's were so good at writing art lyrics!
Art lyrics that felt contemporary. Like Jimi Hendrix lyrics, or Jefferson Airplane lyrics.
Maybe one day we will get back to making poetry that is meant to be poetry somewhere outside song lyrics, and not just social protest poetry or intellectual experiment poetry!
Maybe!
I try to make what I write poetic, anyway!
And we have Led Zeppelin lyrics and Joni Mitchell lyrics! And the whole world of things like that!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson