Sound & Sense: An Open Thread

The second of our recurring opportunities to learn what your fellow readers are reading — and writing

Edward Poynter, Erato, Muse of Poetry, 1870 (Wikimedia Commons)

There has always — well, maybe not always, but for millennia, at least — been poetry about poetry. Take Horace’s c. 19 B.C. Ars Poetica, hexameters about the writer’s art. Along the way, we’re told ut pictura poesis (l.361): “as painting, so poetry.” That’s a theme that will run through the centuries, reaching a peak in the eighteenth century with the formal sensibilities of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in English and Gotthold Lessing’s 1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in German.

Or take the famous sonnets about sonnet-writing: Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, etc. But then we start to get to villanelles about villanelle-writing, haikus about haiku-writing — limericks about limerick-writing, for that matter — and one might be forgiven for thinking that the vast majority of poems about poem-writing have been written in recent decades.

Even while admitting there exist some great ekphrastic poems (poetry descr…