SOURCE: Ditsky, John. “The Music in ‘The Open Boat’.” NDQ: North Dakota Quarterly 56, no. 1 (winter 1988): 119-30.

In the following essay, Ditsky delineates the musical qualities of “The Open Boat.”

The interrelationship of music and literature is a subject that has long fascinated both laymen and the critics of both disciplines. Perhaps the fact that the two arts are so palpably similar in so many respects has been responsible for the difficulty of going beyond the patent without in the process becoming entangled in the technical verbiage peculiar to each form of expression. And yet, though the number of creative talents adept in both forms has always been relatively small, it has been common enough for practitioners in the one to dabble in the other: Shaw, we know, wrote music criticism, and Pound tried his hand at opera; while Ned Rorem and Virgil Thompson have been accepted as masters...