SOURCE: "The Condition of Music," in Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music, Yale University Press, 1981, pp. 287-346.

In the following essay, Winn explores similarities and differences between poetry and music within the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements toward autonomy in both arts, with particular emphasis on the efforts of the Parnassian and Symbolist poets to make the language of poetry independent of everyday meaning by emulating the effects of music.

Introduction

Wagner's ideas, not to mention his success and his arrogance, were bound to produce opponents, whose works, whether in music or in words, were just as certain to be dismissed as reactionary by his convinced followers. So when Eduard Hanslick published his slender volume Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (The Beautiful in Music) in 1854, it was possible for Wagnerites to dismiss it as mere polemic, the product of Hanslick's known antipathy to Wagner...