Using Music as Poetry - Alizarin Capeland

 Many people would much prefer to explore musical lyrics than poetry, but in reality, they are not so different. Lyrics are just modern poetry set to music. Many ancient poems would have been read in the same way with a beat to accompany them. Still, many people find it easier to understand the lyrics of modern music since the tone is clear and the rhythms help establish how the lyrics should be read. There is less guesswork than trying to understand the flow of poetry. Additionally, lyrics are often more simplified than poetry but that is with the generalization of classical poetry. This is often less true with modern poetry. 

    In fact, I had a teacher in high school who had us analyze an album of our choice for our poetry unit. He said that lyrics have just as much value as poetry and we can learn the same lessons from them. For example, learning the rhetoric of a song is the same as in a poem.  We annotated each song like you would a poem in a collection. It really opened my eyes to the beauty of analyzing lyrics as if they were their own small poems.