‘The melody of letters’: reading literature as a musical exercise

How much of our enjoyment of literature comes from our innate human musicality, from the sounds of the words as we read? Using a mix of prose, poetry and literary criticsm from 1800 onwards, we celebrate literature’s oral roots, revelling in the sounds of words and witnessing ‘melodies’ of imagery and structure snaking in and out of texts. Modern audio books allow ‘songful’ elements to come to the fore, but the history of musico-literary studies stretches back longer -- historically books were habitually read aloud, and think back to oral tradition itself, including such giants as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. This course will encourage you to become a skilled reader in what Robert Louis Stevenson described as ‘the melody of letters’.

Course details

Checking availability...

Start Date

12 Jul 2026

Duration

5 Sessions over one week

End Date

18 Jul 2026

Application Deadline

28 Jun 2026

Location

International Summer Programme

Code

W15Pm23

Tutors

Dr Polly Paulusma

PhD; Bye-Fellow in English, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge;
Associate Professor of Song & Literature, Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, London;
Signed Artist with One Little Independent Records, London

Aims

This course aims to:

identify melodic and rhythmic structures in poetry and prose
‘read’ new meanings in sounded elements of the course literature
have a new awareness of musical features in prose more widely

Course content

If you feel that reading poetry and prose is a musical exercise, if the beauty of a prose passage or poem can make your hairs stand on end the way a piece of music does, but you’ve been unable to articulate how the music of prose and poetry works on you, then this course is for you. Focused mostly on C20th and C21st writers, we will first pay a visit to critics who have mused on the delicate relationship between words and music such as T. S. Eliot and William Gass, and we will read together some of their critical material to contextualise the topic. We will learn once and for all how to perform poetic scansion, banishing any past ghosts, before taking it sideways into prose, and learning how to scan for rhythm in prose grammar and syntax. We will revel in the audial nature of prose literature, reading passages aloud to hear their sounded nature. We will look at particular passages, discovering musicality in writing and learning how to create interpretations from those musical observations. We will hear poets reading their own poetry, to explore the power of audial performance, and the importance of bardic traditions and performance poetry.

What to expect on this course

We will be discussing topic ideas together, reading passages aloud each in turn, and discussing together how these sounded objects make us feel, what impact they have on us, what connections we make, what they mean now. There will be some consumption of amazing historical audio and video of poets reciting, and we will discuss the differences between reading a poem in a book and hearing a poet declaim their own poem. We will workshop poetic scansion, this will be hands-on and there will be worksheets to complete to aid learning. A readiness to be musical, to beat out rhythms on the tables and stamp feet, will be very welcome!

Course sessions

1. ‘The melody of letters’

A deep dive into essays about the musicality of prose literature, in particular Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 essay ‘On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature', and William Gass’s ‘The Music of Prose’, with some extracts of ‘musical’ prose — James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Smart, Vladimir Nabokov — rhythmic, poetic language expresses meaning through musicality from across the canon.

2. Lambs, trochees, dactyls and anapaests

or - fantastic feet and where to find them. A selection of poems and how to identify different rhythmical feet.

3. ‘The auditory imagination’

T S Eliot’s essays 'The Music of Poetry' (1948) and ‘The Uses of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’. His poetry ‘Prufrock’ and selections of ‘The Waste Land’.

4. But what makes prose musical?

Songfulness in prose writing. Angela Carter, extracts from ‘Shadow Dance’ and her short story ‘The Erl-King’ refracted through the critical lenses of Lawrence Kramer's Musical Meaning, Calvin Brown’s Music and Literature: A comparison of the arts, Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction and Emily Petermann’s The Musical Novel, and my own published work on ‘canorography’ or songful prose, melodies in prose structures such as parabola and chiasmus and rhythm in syntax. We’ll also look at Anthony Burgess and Kazuo Ishiguru, both ‘musical’ writers. We’ll work out how to do scansion on prose. Reading aloud prose, Zadie Smith reads (and sings!) her short story about Billie Holliday. Rhythms and melodies in prose.

5. Reading aloud poets

Reading aloud: Kae Tempest ‘Brand New Ancients’, Benjamin Zephaniah, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Maya Anjelou, what it is like to hear the poets reading their own poems. Links between oral traditions, balladry, the bardic tradition, sound and meaning.

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

carry out scansion to a skilled level
develop a deep understanding of sounded comprehension
acquire a list of exciting new resources for reading, listening and further research

Required reading

There is no required reading for this course. See Course materials for supplementary reading once registered