Since the millennium, certain trends in Anglophone poetry have echoed the ‘turn’ in Western art music away from what we might think of as mid-century ‘scholasticism’ towards such conventional musical rewards as readily detectable patterning, or euphony. Artistic credibility and a response by non-specialist audiences no longer appear inimical. It has once again become possible to develop serious original work using traditional verse forms such as the ballad (which we saw at work in Chapter 6), or musical tropes as familiar as the rising or falling scale on which Arvo Pärt's famous Fratres is built.

This shift, from the complex and unfamiliar to material that is distilled and empirically accessible, makes us ask whether it is cultural conditioning, or some innate human capacity, that lets us experience certain tropes as more accessible than others. (Recent work with MRI scanning shows that the experience of reading poetry ‘lights up’ areas of the brain associated with music, but not always those associated with reading prose.) But quasi-scientific questions like these address the causes rather than the character of art music and poetry, and so fall outside the scope of this book. I'm trying to map music onto poetry, not onto the brain. Instead, in this chapter I'll look at similarities between the ways in which traditional forms are used and experienced in poetry and music.

Fratres was written in 1977, though it continued to be revised and re-arranged until 1992. But in poetry it's the last two decades in particular that have seen a revival of influential work in strict forms such as the sonnet. The artforms are out of step with each other. But this time lag also reflects a relative lack of urgency to the changes under way in verse. Poetry was never as wholly immersed in a ‘new scholasticism’ as was Western art music. To date there have always remained pathways and schools within which Anglophone verse could practise conventional compositional techniques. For example, North American verse has arguably been more successful than the British tradition at developing traditional ‘musical’ resources within free verse. While recognisably formal projects have flourished within the US vers libre tradition, in Britain its adoption has sometimes seemed more like a breaking of the old ‘bonds’ of full rhyme and strict metre than the introduction of new sounds.