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  • Music in Poetry
  • Northrop Frye (bio)
Northrop Frye

A lecturer in English in Victoria College.

Footnotes

1. There is no explicit recognition of this in Browning’s Parleying with Smart, but his admiration for the poem is obviously connected with it. Smart’s interest in the musical effects possible to poetry is clearly marked in Jubilate Agno, sec. XVIII (ed. Stead, London, 1939).

2. That the Sir Thopas stanza can be admirable for musical poetry is shown by the Song to David.

3. Chapman, in P.M.L.A., XLVI, 177–81.

4. Of course some of those who read the rough and bumpy lines of the pre-Tyrwhitt editions would take him for a musical poet: the use made of him in the Shepheards Calender indicates that Spenser did.

5. These are rare in poetry: the mezzoforte direction for Lycidas, “Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string,” is an example.

6. Poems of Sir Thomas Wiat, ed. Foxwell, I, 34.

7. Note 33 to Davideis, Book I. This explanation, which is worthy of Paracelsus, comes rather oddly from the panegyrist of Bacon and Hobbes.

8. Lycidas, I. 1.

9. Paradise Lost, I, 128.

10. Life of Milton.

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