I found the following quote at: http://www.musicforthesoul.org/quotes.html "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music" "The School of Giorgione," Walter Pater And at http://www.umass.edu/umpress/fall_99/kirbysmith.html a reference to a book, which I'll probably order myself. Forgive me for quoting so much of it: The Celestial Twins Poetry and Music through the Ages H. T. Kirby-Smith A sweeping historical survey of the relation of poetry to music in Western culture "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music," wrote Walter Pater. The Celestial Twins, while recognizing many affinities between music and poetry, argues that poetry in Western culture has repeatedly separated itself from musical contexts and that the best poetry is a purely verbal art. H. T. Kirby-Smith makes his case with wit and erudition, proceeding chronologically and citing numerous examples of specific poems-from Latin, Old French, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, modern French, and English. He points out that ancient Greek poetry, including the epics, was part of a musical context. By contrast, almost no surviving Latin poetry was written for musical performance, but the meters of Latin poetry were borrowed from Greek musical meters. Similarly, in their own ways, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, and Langston Hughes all wrote out of musical contexts: Hardy from west-of-England songs and dances; Eliot from Wagnerian opera and late Beethoven chamber music; and Hughes from blues, jazz, and spirituals. Although poets from Horace to Shakespeare to Dickinson have instinctively recognized the separation of music and poetry, there have also been well-meaning attempts to bring these allied arts back into close association with each other. But in Kirby-Smith's view, poetry of the highest order has always maintained a respectful distance from music, even while retaining some memory of musical rhythms and organization. The question of the connection between music and poetry has been on my mind. I am reminded of the text by Herman Broch "The Death Of Virgil" which he wrote with music constantly as a backround structural inspiration. Awesome text. Claude Levi-Strauss in the four parts of his Mythologiques took up the relation between mythological structures of the mind, concrete categories of perceptions specific to differenct cultural groups, and musical theory. He's a little rough on "ritual" and seems to corral it in with post-modernist attempts to dissolve and disintegrate everything into the nonsense out of which it came. But that is just my "first" impression. The quote above makes it difficult to determine whether Walter Pater originated the sentiment or if he was quoting, say, Plato. The quote is also in Pater's "The Renaissance": "That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation--that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. (Renaissance 95)" This last material was poached or snatched from the following site http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/zukofsky/scroggins.htm Which looks very, very interesting. Otherwise, I have only heard of Walter Pater through the Rhetorical Works of Kenneth Burke, who had been the "Musical Chronicler" on "The Dial" an artistic and literary publication in the 20's and 30's based in Grenwich Village. Sorry I haven't been able to be more specific about Pater himself. I'm ordering the books. Perhaps more later, Sincerely Leslie Bruder