‘A Certain Noise’: Approaching the ‘Music of Poetry’

Abstract

This article considers T. S. Eliot’s preoccupation with ‘the music of poetry’, a subject he addressed throughout his career. It was a certain ‘music’ to which the first readers of The Waste Land responded in the poem. This music, I argue, is not a matter of melodious sounds or acoustic mimicry. Rather, it is to be discerned in ‘a certain noise’ (Joseph Brodsky’s phrase), an underlying pulse. In order to examine this rhythmic prompt, I look at the graphic manifestations of another poet, Henri Michaux, who wrote lines of poetry and, in equal abundance, drew and painted maelstroms of lines that often share the page with the poems. These graffiti-like emanations provide us with a visual rendering of the ‘music of poetry’.