SUMMARY

ALEXANDER MAKHOV

MUSICA LITERARIA

The Idea of Verbal Music in the European Poetics

The aim of this book is to trace the influence of musical ideas on poetics from ancient Greece up to modern times.

The idea of «musicality» as special quality of poetry appeared in the late antiquity (Dionysius Halicarnassus). During two thousand years this idea has been constantly changing: Longinus, Dante, Eustache Deschamp, George Puttenham, Philip Sidney, Novalis, Joseph Joubert, Stephan Mallarme, Thomas Eliot and many others have talked about the poetry as a kind of music, but in fact they have interpreted that «poetical music» in different ways.

Literary theorists of all times believe that poetry and mu­sic are very much alike, that some kind of «verbal music» can exist. There always has been an exchange of concepts and terms between the musical theory and poetics. Such ideas as melody, harmony, polyphony, «concordia discors», have been adopted by poetics, obtaining here a new meaning.

In spite of this close historical interrelation between music and poetry, the development of so-called «verbal music» has a logic of its own. This logic has very little in common with the development of music as such.

«Verbal music» is a kind of aesthetic fiction, which reflected longing of a poetic word for musical expression, its vain hopes to become music itself. Poetry, of course, never could become music. Nevertheless, the fiction of verbal music always has been very productive idea, helping poetry to find its own forms and ways of expression. Trying to become music, poetry, on the one hand, fails, but, on the other hand, it creates in fact music of its own, «other music» (1'autre musique), as Eustache Deschamps said.