Some lines of poetry viewed as music

We propose to take literally the notion that poetry aspires to the state of music. Our point of departure is the “deep parallel” between music and language discussed in section 12.3 of Lerdahl & Jackendoff’s A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (henceforth GTTM), where a mapping is shown between prosodic trees, which represent syllabic stress hierarchies (Liberman & Prince, 1977), and GTTM’s dine-span trees, which represent pitch-event hierarchies. Figure la illustrates the mapping, figure lb its application to the word “reconciliation”. In addition, the forms of the two theories are similar: each requires prior segmentation of a sequence into hierarchical units, well-fonnedness conditions on trees, and principles of prominence for assigning tree structures for any given sequence.