Word: lyricizing
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Lewis said written ballads and other lyric poems have often successfully transformed this "story lyric" without using a tune, "although it helps if you have a folk tune in your head." He quoted poems from Yeats, Graves and Auden as examples...
...Unless some poets are willing to experiment with words set to music, the lyric impulse may fade out completely," C. Day Lewis warned when he spoke--and sang--in last night's Charles Eliot Norton lecture...
Lewis' speech, entitled "Words and Music," pointed out the difficulties of creating a simple lyric today. The British poet suggested that writing words for music can help by "clearing away much of the verbal undergrowth." The music can be a "cover for the simplicity of the words," Lewis explained...
Lewis sang several other lyrics to illustrate the history of this type of poetry. Elizabethan verse closely joined words and music, he said. The earlier seventeenth century actually interpreted moods through music, but conversational router and metaphysical complexity have both served to divorce the lyric from its musical origin...
...Despite the distractions, smash musical after smash musical kept materializing on the quires of composition paper he kept in his luggage. By 1937, he had done 15 of them, including Paris, Fifty Million Frenchmen, Red, Hot and Blue, and Anything Goes, the show which contained a lyric whose rhymes and similes transfigured the art and cast the moon-June school into lasting shade...