'Discuss the difference in presentation of rhythm and music between T.S. Eliot and S. T. Coleridge.'

That a ‘man, that hath not music in his soul — can never be a true poet’ is a tenet showing how closely music and poetry must be intertwined in the artist’s mind: if the detailing of our emotions is our lifeblood, and a poem the vein it runs through, then rhythm and music is, put simply, the heartbeat which pushes it forward. Rhythm, within their poetry, pushes the words forward, moulds the reader's perception of different words; rhythm constantly pushes forward. If ‘music and poetry are temporal art forms’ then rhythm/musical aesthetic change as humans change. So musical aesthetic is multifaceted: socio-historical, conceptual, personal; it is all of these aesthetics which I will examine. For Eiot, rhythm and is a social glue which he uses to explore British identity after the First World War. For Coleridge, though, rhythm/music are a recognition ‘that man is designed for a higher state of existence’. It is incorrect to approach them as ‘a strictly-patterned regularity’—they are both as far reaching as life itself. Rather, a more fitting argument is that it is impossible for a human to ‘hath not music in his soul’; really, ’you are the music / while the music lasts’.

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Answered by Immy O. English Literature tutor

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