'Poetry Is Sound Before It Is Anything Else'

“A word so delicious that one wishes it had cheeks, so as to kiss them.”

That’s Jules Renard, writing in his journal in February 1888. Perhaps only a certain sort of writer, one with a musical sense who is susceptible to the pure sound of words divorced from their meaning, can understand. We might assume that every writer, particularly poets, is so equipped, but that’s not the case. Most of today’s poets are tin-eared and write enervated prose. I’m talking about sound, not denotation.

 

In A Backward Glance (1934), Edith Wharton reports her friend Henry James saying: “Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” Their referent is beautiful but the words themselves have an indifferent sound. Somewhere, Faulkner said the most evocative word in English word, if not the most beautiful, was twilight.

 

The word I most enjoy saying, for its soft consonants and iambic smoothness, is molybdenum – the element on the periodic table with the symbol Mo. The metal has thirty-nine known isotopes, which nicely brings to mind Eric Ormsby’s essay “Poetry as Isotope” (Facsimiles of Time, 2001):

 

“Poetry is made up of words and words are sounds. Poetry is sound before it is anything else. This is easy to forget. Indeed, this little fact is more usually forgotten than remembered by poets themselves, and it is why much of our contemporary poetry is so unmemorable.”

 

 [Renard’s observation is drawn from his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]