The Lullaby Is The Spell Whereby The

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".

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.

A Cabaret Song Has Got To Be Written - For The Middle Voice, Ideally - Because You've Got To Hear The Wit Of The Words. And A Cabaret Song Gives The Singer Room To Act, More Even Than An Opera Singer.

My Feeling Is That Poetry Will Wither On The Vine If You Don't Regularly Come Back To The Simplest Fundamentals Of The Poem: Rhythm, Rhyme, Simple Subjects - Love, Death, War.

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.