Literary Modernism and Melody: An Avant-Propos

In one of his eager attempts to impose classifications on poetry, Ezra Pound, in 1914, identified a kind of verse in which “sheer melody seems as if it were just bursting into speech” (Gaudier-Brzeska 82). Such melopoeic poetry, as he labeled it elsewhere, was not a marginal curiosity, he claimed, but “marked only the best lyric periods” (Selected Prose 27). In Pound’s definition, melos does not equal melody or song, “the arrangement of single notes in expressive succession . . . [o]ften contrasted with harmony,” but musicality in general (“melody”). Melopoeia thus refers to a poetry that is governed by conspicuous sound patterns and rhythms. Defined in this way, the melopoeic qualities of modernist literature have received ample attention from literary scholars. In the articles in this special section, however, we wish to trace the implications of melos for literary modernism when it is conceived of specifically as melody.

Borrowed from the realm of music, melody belongs to a field of which the ties to modernist literature are undisputed. Modernism witnessed a peak of musico-literary collaborations and cross-fertilizations. To begin with, writers drew inspiration from musical forms: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, for instance, famously solicits comparisons with Beethoven’s late string quartets, and James Joyce reputedly modeled the Sirens chapter from Ulysses on a fugue. Others coupled their work with actual music. Edith Sitwell enlisted the musical skill of William Walton to write an accompaniment to her poetry cycle Façade, and W. B. Yeats recruited young composer and modernist enfant terrible George Antheil to furnish musical intermezzos for his play Fighting the Waves. Conversely, composers not only let themselves be inspired by the work of literary colleagues, but also paid renewed attention to the century-old debate on the hierarchy between words and music. Schoenberg’s epitomic Pierrot Lunaire, written to symbolist poems by Albert Giraud, sounded out the possibility of giving words and melody equal weight through Sprechgesang, and Virgil Thomson set out to precisely transpose into music the specific cadences of American language in the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, composed to a Gertrude Stein libretto.¹

Melody was, however, hardly the pivot of these musico-literary ventures. The Oxford Dictionary of Music defines melody as follows: “A succession of notes, varying in pitch, which have an organized and recognizable shape. Melody is ‘horizontal,’ i.e. the notes are heard consecutively, whereas in harmony notes are sounded simultaneously (‘vertical’).” In an attempt to portray the increasing complexities of modern life, perhaps most notably the experience of simultaneity sharpened by, for instance, electronic communication and the welter of impressions confronting the modern city dweller, writers turned to music’s “vertical” models of representation. The complex formats of harmony or polyphony better suited their purposes than the straightforward monolinearity of melody. When Eliot defines the music of poetry, for instance, he makes a case for precisely a “vertical” dimension as the point at which all possible meanings of a poem’s words intersect: “My purpose here is to insist that a ‘musical poem’ is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meaning of the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one” (Eliot 33). In modernist music, simultaneity similarly vied with melodic horizontality in techniques such as the polyrhythms in Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation and the atonal polyphonic textures of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra.

For many modernist artists, moreover, melody came with obsolete connotations. George Antheil spoke for many of his contemporaries when challenging “the melodies and tunes or the tonal forms handed down to us by the great masters” (qtd. in Albright 71).² Modernist harmonic experiments—subverting tonality, introducing rhythmical innovations, disrupting the pull of metrical regularity—resulted in disintegrated melodic lines that are a far cry from the thirty-two-bar tunes of early nineteenth-century melodists such as Beethoven. Similarly, in innovating literary circles, melody was looked upon as a relic from the past. Modernist writers tended to associate it with the euphoniousness of iconic...