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Shakespeare sta tes the common p lace:
The man that ha th no music in himself
Nor is no t moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treason s, stratagems, and spoils.
633
By analogy, according
LO
litera ry idea li :,ts like Sidney, the same was
true o f poe try; and the various genres of poetry were expected
LO
in spire
va ri o us pass ions- epic inspired no bl e va lor, pa trio ti sm, etc.; sonnets
in spired amorousness-by analogy with the varying musica l modes o f
th e Greeks.
By the end o f the seventeenth century, Engli sh poetry had ex–
hausted and tri vili alized its cosmi c mu sica l identifi ca ti o n . Restora ti on
verse empl oyed the metaphor of heavenl y music mos li y LO comp limenl
prelly ladi es pl aying lutes. The power
LO
influence personal emo ti on
was still cl a imed for bo th mu sic and poetry; but, as Holl ander dis–
cerned, when Dryden a t the close of the " Ode for Sl. Ceceli a's Day"
h yperbo li ca ll y (or nonsensicall y) announced that "music shall unlune
the sky," th a t sky was no lo nger seri ously felt to be the di vinely
ha rmoni ous source of music, or, by extension , of poetry.
If
we take a hi stori c perspecti ve outside of litera ture, we under–
stand immedi a tely tha t the sky's unlunin g became inevitabl e when the
heaven o f Copernicus and Newton replaced the heaven of PLOl emy; i.e.,
in the seventeenth century. No mo re concenlric spheres around our
world , no mo re
primum mobile:
no more music of the spheres. Here
commences a kind of cri sis o f modern poetry. No compa rable domina t–
ing paradi gm for poetic order has repl aced tha t of music, although , as
manifestoes from Al exander Pope to Charl es Ol sen may indica te,
secul ar na ture is perhaps the implicit model for all poetry after
New ton . To be sure, the meaning o f the term shifts, and poeti c fo rms
fo llow. Fo r the eighteenth century, "na ture" meant a ra ti onal and
mechani ca l order. Homer was " na ture methodiz'd," and the strict
hero ic coupl et domina ted Eng lish verse. For the nineteenth century, as
a llention shifted from physics to bi ology, " nature" became the organic
p rincipl e of creation , growth , and des tructio n ; form became a ma tter o f
m ys terious organi c ra ther than mechanica l unity; poems grew looser in
rhythm, more vari ed in structure. Whitman , for exampl e, speaks as a
h yper-Romanti c when he decl a res th a t hi s verse is no t "somethin g
fini shed , compl eted, and technicall y beautiful " like a palace, but ra ther
like " the Ocean ," whose verses are
the liq uid, billowy waves, ever ri sing and fa lling, perh aps wild with
storm, a lways mo ving, always a like in their nature as rolling waves,
