Chris Forhan: The Sense of Sound (July 2000)

Inverting Frost’s phrase “the sound of sense,” Chris Forhan explores what he calls “the sense of sound,” or the meaning a poem’s music conveys. Through close readings of poems by Shakespeare, Blake, and Keats, and drawing, too, on prose about poetry by Shelley, Stevens, and Strand, Forhan examines how poems can use rhythm and other aspects of sound to produce tension between resolution and the delay of resolution, and, ultimately, shape solitude into song, finding a music for truths that are “unsayable.”