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Updated: June 23, 2025
Of course, through their meanings, word-sounds indicate the causes and objects of emotion and this differentiates music from poetry but in poetry the emotion is still the primary thing, springing from inner strivings, and not from objects, as in painting and sculpture.
However, in the case of familiar words with a strong emotional significance, the fusion of image with sound may be almost complete. Who, for example, does not see a sweet and red image of a rose into the word-sounds when he reads: Oh, my love's like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June. Or, when Dante describes the selva oscura, who does not see the darkness in the word oscura?
For this reason poetry is better, I think, when read to oneself than when read aloud; for then the sound and the sense are more intimate; the attention is not drawn off to the former away from the latter. Moreover, try as he will, the poet can never make his word-sounds fully harmonious; some roughness and dissonance will remain; but in silent reading these qualities disappear.
In the present chapter we shall concern ourselves chiefly with the elements, leaving the study of most of the problems of structure to the following chapter. In a painting, for example, there are colors; in a piece of music, tones; in a poem, word-sounds. To this material, secondly, are attached vague feelings.
The former kind, which I shall consider first, comprises all cases of the emotional expressiveness of the medium itself, of tones and word-sounds and their rhythms and patterns, of colors and lines and space-forms and their designs. The detailed study of this expressiveness I shall leave to the chapters on the arts; here I wish merely to indicate the kind of psychological process involved.
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