SOURCE: "Poetry and Jazz: A Twentieth-Century Wedding," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 595-620.

In the following essay, Wallenstein discusses the influence of jazz on poetry as an exemplary artistic phenomenon of the twentieth century.

I

In a manner of speaking, poetry has always craved the company of music. Tone, rhythm and cadence, and lyricism, too, are the property of both. It is the music inside the poet's head that determines the meter and often the mood of the words as they fall to the page. So there is nothing odd about poets joining with musicians in the performance of their work. Minstrels, the troubadours and trouvères of Provence, and, in more recent times, poets have collaborated with musicians and composers in the creation of opera, lieder, tone poems, choral works, songs of all kinds, and jazz.

There are, it seems to me, three...