One Does Not Become A Guru By

An Aria In An Opera - Handel's 'ombra Mai Fu,' For Example - Gets Along With An Incredibly Small Number Of Words And Ideas And A Large Amount Of Variation And Repetition. That's The Beauty Of It. It's Not Taxing To The Listener's Intelligence Because If You Haven't Heard It The First Time Round, It'll Come Around Again.

At Four Lines, With The Quatrain, We Reach The Basic Stanza Form Familiar From A Whole Range Of English Poetic Practice. This Is The Length Of The Ballad Stanza, The Verse Of A Hymn, And Innumerable Other Kinds Of Verse.

My Sonnet Asserts That The Sonnet Still Lives. My Epic, Should Such Fortune Befall Me, Asserts That The Heroic Narrative Is Not Lost - That It Is Born Again.

I've Not Been A Prolific Poet, And It Always Seemed To Me To Be A Bad Idea To Feel That You Had To Produce In Order To Get... Credits. Production Of A Collection Of Poems Every Three Years Or Every Five Years, Or Whatever, Looks Good, On Paper. But It Might Not Be Good; It Might Be Writing On A Kind Of Automatic Pilot.

Composers Need Words, But They Do Not Necessarily Need Poetry. The Russian Composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, Who Chose Texts From Newspaper Small Ads, Had A Good Point To Make. With Revolutionary Music, Any Text Can Be Set To Work.