Had little to do during the holiday over here, managed to put down some of my less screwed up thoughts 😀
Is poetry really the highest form of communication? Poetry can communicate complex ideas and feelings simultaneously with their emotional components. This makes a very accurate and precise, but all the while very broad modus of communication possible. Poetic forms can even prepare the subject mind to recieve the carried information in an accommodating way, using certain lyrical or acustic tricks, characteristic of that language, which call for immediate reaction in the brain. But let’s look at the competition.
Music is probably the strongest of them. It could be the oldest form of communication of human beings. In immitating the sounds born by nature, it can stir the deepest, most ancient instincts, which even preceed our species. That makes it so powerful, on a level we’re not even able to cognitively recognize, that music is the favorite instrument of manipulating human emotions. Classical music uses this quality and thus can take us with the help of complicated acustical patterns through a remarkable palette of emotions.
What happens if you combine music with poetry? Wouldn’t that kind of synergy create an even more powerful medium of communication? Turns out music is so infinitely more powerful on a basic level, that it mostly blocks the intellectual component carried by lyrics. When you hear a song, all that matters is the music, the tembre and patterns of the singer’s voice, the emotions they create. The lyrical part mostly reaches our perception through isolated words, which punctuate the emotional continuity we’re experiencing, and enhance or downplay it. That makes the combination of lyrics and music extremely powerful, yet so basic that complex ideas and intellectual constructs are not communicated. The poetry has to play the subordinate role of mere lyrics.