The sound of reading

Abstract

This essay recounts, in autobiographical form, how poetry transformed me. It began at school with an unanticipated response to the internal music of a poem. Later, drawn primarily by sound and image, I responded to form, texture, ideas and movement in particular poems. These poems and poets – a few of them quoted here – woke me into an awareness of where I was, and gave me the courage to live with my confusion.

Keywords: Sound, poetry, psychology of reading