# Composers who were also Poets



## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

I have had the great fortune to finally find out about David Jones. He's considered one of the very best poets of the 20th Century by Auden, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, etc. but he's also one of the most important painters.

It made me wonder if there were any composers that were considered good poets.

That's what I do, btw (www.rspearson.com).


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## Ich muss Caligari werden (Jul 15, 2020)

(Sir) Arnold Bax comes immediately to mind as one of, I believe, very few...


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Ciurlionis.


ETA Hoffmann, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Nabokov, and the Medieval Troubadours and Minnesaenger are among those that come to mind ... but it's more like they were, secondarily, also composers.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Guillaume de Machaut was both poet and composer.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Mendelssohn wrote some. He also fine artist. Amazingly gifted.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

*Composers who were also Poets*

Bob Dylan.

He has a Nobel Prize to prove it.


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

Ich muss Caligari werden said:


> (Sir) Arnold Bax comes immediately to mind as one of, I believe, very few...


Bax was a superb writer. His memoir 'Farewell My Youth' is elegant, touching and often quite funny


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

PS I don't know of any other examples. But just imagine if Charles Ives had taken up the pen and composed a collection of rough, tough limericks about his contemporaries.


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## Ich muss Caligari werden (Jul 15, 2020)

Pat Fairlea said:


> Bax was a superb writer. His memoir 'Farewell My Youth' is elegant, touching and often quite funny


Agree 110%; I still recollect memorable passages from it. I read it when considerably younger and old age seemed something afflicting 'other folks.'


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

regenmusic said:


> I have had the great fortune to finally find out about David Jones. He's considered one of the very best poets of the 20th Century by Auden, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, etc. but he's also one of the most important painters.
> 
> It made me wonder if there were any composers that were considered good poets.
> 
> That's what I do, btw (www.rspearson.com).


John Cage wrote acrostics.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> John Cage wrote acrostics.


He called them Mesostics.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Cyril Scott, Ivor Gurney, and Arrigo Boito fit the bill. Vivaldi wrote the poems for _Le quattro stagioni_.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> He called them Mesostics.


Well done, I was racking my brains trying to remember.


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## Orfeo (Nov 14, 2013)

How about Richard Wagner? Granted, there is poetry in his libretti, but he stands out in particular.


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## gvn (Dec 14, 2019)

SONNET CLV said:


> *Composers who were also Poets*
> 
> Bob Dylan.
> 
> He has a Nobel Prize to prove it.


In literature... but *not* in music.


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## gvn (Dec 14, 2019)

More seriously than my previous post: I think this is a very, very difficult question.

Most composers could rhyme a bit, although well below the standard of their music (Berlioz*, Wagner...).

A few writers could compose a bit, although well below the standard of their writing (Rousseau, Hoffmann...).

But someone of the standard of David Jones, who produced _both_ first-rate literature _and_ first-rate visual art... not sure whether there has been anyone.

Maybe Machaut... I don't know. I can read medieval French, but I don't have enough sensitivity to tell whether it's well written or badly written.

My wife and I would definitely nominate Boito. To us, he's one of the supreme opera composers of all time, right up there with the very best of them. But that's an extreme minority view. Generally he's regarded as being in the Rousseau category: an excellent writer who could compose competent undistinguished music.

So perhaps R. S. Pearson will be the first!

*Berlioz is a curious case. He wrote brilliant prose (e.g., in his _Mémoires_), but very feeble verse ("Lève vers la voûte azurée / L'oeil de ton âme rassurée," etc.). I often wish he had written the libretto of _Les Troyens_ in prose! I suspect Bax is somewhat similar. I fully agree about the beauty of his prose memoir _Farewell My Youth_, but I don't think he rates even a footnote in the standard histories of English poetry.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

gvn said:


> Maybe Machaut... I don't know. I can read medieval French, but I don't have enough sensitivity to tell whether it's well written or badly written.


Machaut is considered the equal to Chaucer and by some to be primarily a poet and only secondarily a composer.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

gvn said:


> More seriously than my previous post: I think this is a very, very difficult question.
> 
> Most composers could rhyme a bit, although well below the standard of their music (Berlioz*, Wagner...).
> 
> ...


Here's a nice bit of Machaut



> Puis que la douce rousee
> D'Umblesse ne vuet florir
> Pitez, tant que meüree
> Soit Mercy que tant desir,
> ...


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Among the earliest known examples of the composer/poet is the now ubiquitous Hildegard von Bingen. Her great collection of music and poetry, _Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum_, is a collection of 77 songs forming a liturgical cycle for the church year, and a music drama, Ordo Virtutum.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Machaut wrote over 400 poems, some long narrative works. Of these only about 20 were set to music. He is credited with influencing a number of poets, including Chaucer and Deschamps.



> One of the foremost poets of the younger generation in the closing decades of the fourteenth century, Eustache Deschamps took the occasion of the death of Guillaume de Machaut in 1378 to memorialize him with two ballades (numbers 123 and 124).1 The Champenois poet-musician, so Deschamps avers, was the mondains dieux d'armonie (the earthly divinity of harmony) as well as le noble rethorique (the noble rhetorician). Machaut was thus a master of two arts, poetry and music, and of the different forms, particularly lyric poetry in its several fixed types, in which these two kinds of composition figured together. Such a comprehensive vocation to text making was celebrated by his peers as an aspirational ideal important enough to merit a textual form of its own in Deschamps' Art de Dictier (The Art of Poetry). Deschamps' learned treatise exerted considerable influence and promoted the theory that music and poetry are both essentially musical forms, with the first being "artificial" since it must be studied and learnt, and the second "natural;" being more dependent on talent than intention.2 Machaut's masterpiece, the Voir Dit (True Poem), offers an ornate and complex mélange of prose letters, narrative passages in octosyllabic couplets, and lyrics, some of which are set to music that is transcribed in situ. [R. Barton Palmer (Editor). "Guillaume de Machaut, The Boethian Poems: General Introduction." from: _Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry & Music, Volume 2: The Boethian Poems_ (2019)]


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## Sequentia (Nov 23, 2011)

Sorabji wrote some poetry.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> Machaut wrote over 400 poems, some long narrative works. Of these only about 20 were set to music. He is credited with influencing a number of poets, including Chaucer and Deschamps.


You must be making a distinction between lyrics and poems which were designed to stand alone but which also may have been set. Unless Machaut didn't write the lyrics to his motets, ballades etc. By the way, don't hesitate to get yourself this


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Mandryka said:


> You must be making a distinction between lyrics and poems which were designed to stand alone but which also may have been set. Unless Machaut didn't write the lyrics to his motets, ballades etc. By the way, don't hesitate to get yourself this
> 
> View attachment 149027


It's on my to-get list. The "20" might have been referring to parts of the narrative poems. I am unsure the amount of original poetry in a motet text. I have thought that motet texts were scriptural in nature, but I could be wrong. The point is, Machaut was a major poet whose output of poetry was large and numbers more than his surviving music.


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

I know some who were also pets.

Tchaikovsky to Madame von Meck, Haydn to the Esterhazys...


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Is that phraise, "The Lion of Nobility" from a Machaut title or lyric/poem? It would be interesting to read him in English. I love what the Medieval mind said about "magnificence," being a state in which all the virtues were active at once. "Lion of Nobility" is in the same mindset.


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## gvn (Dec 14, 2019)

regenmusic said:


> Is that phraise, "The Lion of Nobility" from a Machaut title or lyric/poem?


Yes, it's Machaut's description of the unnamed king (perhaps Jean II) whose fall is lamented in his lay _En demantant et lamentant_. As you say, it's one of those phrases that seem to evoke the mindset of a whole era. The poem can be read in French and English on Hyperion's website (click on "English" beside track 6).


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## gvn (Dec 14, 2019)

*Campion.* How could I forget *Campion*? His words & music are just about exactly matched in style, tone, and, I'd say, quality: gracefully crafted miniatures with an uncommon ability to create memorable phrases (in words _and_ in music!). He stands out from other Elizabethan/Jacobean songwriters (a) in his literary ability and (b) in his versatility--he seems thoroughly at home in everything from the lightest love ditties to the most solemn devotional poetry.

There's a good edition of his collected writings here.

Sample of his work:






Note how the music fits the text as closely as a glove, phrase by phrase, _in each stanza_. Very typical of his method.

Isolated songs by Campion are strewn across many CDs, and there are also several discs devoted entirely to his work, the best received being by Robin Blaze on Hyperion:









and by Steven Rickards on Naxos:


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Richard Wagner wrote all of his libretto for this operas and he considered the librettos as poems.


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