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Well, you're entitled to abandon the enquiry David, but I believe the distinctions are still operative and for that reason thought it worth trying to articulate them. I don't think the differences are merely semantic, though of course the terms can cause confusion - I can straightaway think, for example, of five distinct usages of the word 'lyric'. For it to be worthwhile you'd (one would) have to have an interest in the way song does and doesn't operate in poems. Jamie Sent from my iPad > On 22 Oct 2016, at 14:11, David Lace <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > It seems to me, Jamie, that given the seeming impossibility of any definitive (and un-problematical) definition of the difference between a song and a poem, we should just simply accept that there is no difference. From what you say, there are so many “overlaps” that maybe the “category problem” is simply an illusion and wanting for a better linguistic expression if it. In other words, it could just be a problem of semantics that is causing all this needless confusion in finding a distinction between the two arts--which are really just the same art in my view. > > > > > > ---------------------Original Message--------------- > > Jamie McKendrick wrote: > > Hi David, I'm still trying to work out how you got here from my possibly too sketchy though laborious notes on the distinction between songwriting and poems. Your earlier supposition that my idea of a poem excluded the 'ugly' (or prosaic?) was far from my intended meaning. Here likewise when you suppose I was saying 'without the music the lyrics of a song are without any "poetical" qualities". It wouldn't cross my mind to claim that. Rhyme and meter (though often a different approach to both) may obviously be held in common and are features that link both. It might help to see the two arts as overlapping but divergent tendencies. (Though also on occasion convergent.) As I said earlier the absence of a clear distinction doesn't mean the absence of any distinction. > To put it crudely, the question as to whether the words of the piece were meant to be said or sung would give you a rough distinction. A 'rough' not a 'clear' distinction. I'd say, as an example, that Patrick Kavanagh's 'Raglan Road' was very much the former though still Van Morrison makes a brilliant song from it as he does from a passage in Blake's 'Four Zoas'. (But then as someone once said he could make a telephone directory sound like a great song.) > In addition, many poems either are songs or aspire to the songlike - I've already given some examples but think, say, of Yeats's 'Isle of Innisfree' or 'Down by the Sally Gardens' by contrast with 'The Second Coming' or 'The Circus Animals' Desertion'. Conversely, as I said, some Blues songs can be read as effective poems. My argument here - and one that you and many here may disagree with - is that Dylan's songs work well as songs and not as poems. > It would take a thesis to explain what I mean here in this shorthand of 'effectively' and 'work well' but I think most people will understand even if they disagree. Peter's review of Denise Riley does have much of interest on this topic but because he's dealing with the complex and often subversive negotiations her poems have with the 'lyric' it goes into this question with far more depth than these rather basic points of mine. > > Jamie