T.S. Eliot on Sound and Sense: 

   It would be a mistake to assume that all poetry ought to be melodious, or that melody is more than one of the components of the music of words. Some poetry is meant to be sung; most modern poetry is meant to be spoken -- and there are many other things to be spoken of besides the murmur of innumerable bees or the moan of doves in immemorial elms . . .
   What matters is the whole poem: and if the whole poem need not be melodious, it follows that a poem is not made only out of ‘beautiful words’. I doubt whether, from the point of view of sound alone, any word is more or less beautiful than another -- within its own language, for the question whether some languages are not more beautiful than others is quite another question. The ugly words are the words not fitted for the company in which they find themselves; there are words which are ugly because of rawness or because of antiquation; there are words which are ugly because of foreignness or ill-breeding (e.g. television); but I do not believe that any word well-established in its own language is either beautiful or ugly.
   The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or lesser wealth of association. Not all words, obviously, are equally rich and well-connected: it is part of the business of the poet to dispose the richer among the poorer, at the right points, and we cannot afford to load a poem too heavily with the former -- for it is only at certain moments that a word can be made to insinuate the whole history of a language and a civilization (emphasis added). This is an ‘allusiveness’ which is not the fashion or eccentricity of a peculiar type of poetry; but an allusiveness which is in the nature of words, and which is equally the concern of every kind of poet.
   My purpose here is to insist that a ‘musical poem’ is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one. And if you object that is only the pure sound, apart from the sense, to which the adjective ‘musical’ can be rightly applied, I can only reaffirm my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much an abstraction from the poem as is the sense.

(From: T.S. Eliot, "The Music of Poetry")

(LyR Program, NY, May ’98)

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