I am often asked this question by students or casual readers of poetry. Many musical artists present their song lyrics as poetry. This reflects not a commercial move on their part, but a desire for the words they write to be taken seriously.
It is certainly true that poems are taught for better or worse in classrooms and made a part of the canon of literature, whereas songs, especially popular ones, usually are not. If song lyrics are studied in school, often it is ethnographically or anthropologically, to learn something about a culture, not as literature per se. What I suppose some musicians want is not to be considered poets, but for their lyrics to be read with the same respect they imagine poems are.
And it presumes that what is valuable about lyrics is how they reflect those literary values and skills. These might not seem like big issues to a lot of poets and poetry specialists, who are familiar with poetry that has qualities of song lyrics, and vice versa.
The biases inherent in such a widespread distinction do a disservice to both poetry and song. By holding poetry to a literary standard, and either granting or denying that standard to song lyrics, we locate the worth of an artistic endeavor in the most superficial qualities of language, ones that are actually peripheral to what makes a poem worthwhile. In fact, I do think there are important and fascinating differences between lyrics and poems, just not the ones that are usually focused on.
Without all that musical information, lyrics usually do not function as well, precisely because they were intentionally designed that way. The ways the conditions of that environment affect the construction of the words refrain, repetition, the ways information that can be communicated musically must be communicated in other ways in a poem, etc.
As for the question of whether poems can function as song lyrics, the answer seems to be, in the right hands, absolutely yes. These composers recognize, it seems to me, the essential qualities of language in poetry. These musical artists use their considerable skill and sensitivity to design music that moves around and with the poems, never overloading them with musical information or tormenting them into overly strained forms to serve a musical structure, two of the most noticeable qualities of failed musical-poetic collaborations.
To say that this means song lyrics are less literary than poems, or require less skill or intelligence or training or work to create, is patently absurd and, in the case of rap music, patronizing. But that does not mean that song lyrics are poems. They might sometimes accidentally function like poems when taken out of a musical context, but abstracting lyrics from musical information is misleading and beside the point.
It seems to me far more productive to ask how lyrics in songs relate to musical information, and how poems relate to the silences cultural and actual that surround them, and to recognize that lyrics and poetry, while different genres with different forces and imperatives, have both more and less in common than we might think, and are endeavors of equal value. Confronting the many challenges of COVID—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster.
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William Callison , Quinn Slobodian. West German witchcraft trials after World War II reveal how political rupture can fuel magical thinking. Samuel Clowes Huneke. Neither is likely to change many minds. Like the Project, two new books on the The earliest known Western poetry consists of the Iliad and the Odyssey famous and acknowledged as Greek masterpieces.
Greeks at that time mostly used poetry for the celebration of their heroes. It is important to mention poems as lyrics when its verse is set to music or it contains the elements of music.
Difference between Poem and Song. Key Difference: Poem and song both are described as a composition of words with similar nature. The major difference between them is that a song is set to music while a poem is not set to music.
Images Courtesy: enchantedlearning. It is very beautiful line I like it. It is a composition containing words set to music and meant to be sung by singers. Though a song can be sung by a person in his voice without musical instruments, songs are mostly sung along with musical instruments for maximum effect. The words in a song are set in such a manner that they rhyme like in poetry, to have an enhanced effect. Songs may be religious, folk, pop, artistic, and so on.
Deeper feelings and emotions are conveyed in poems, whereas songs are more direct and lighter in meaning. On the other hand, poetry is free from these requirements. Your email address will not be published.
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