Music’s Spell: Poems About Music and Musicians

Emily Fragos, editor
Everyman’s Library/Random House, 2009

      While music may be a universal language that needs no words, poets stretching back to the ancient times have nonetheless sought to represent it in verse. In Music’s Spell: Poems About Music and Musicians, Emily Fragos, an adjunct instructor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, captures these wide-ranging poetic endeavors. The poems are divided into sections on pop and rock, jazz and blues, specific composers and works, various musical instruments, the human voice, the connection between music and love, and music at the close of life.
      The volume includes works from Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and Lord Byron, among others. Fragos, who teaches poetry writing at Gallatin, has also written Little Savage and has edited The Dance: Poems and The Great Cat: Poems about Cats.