Argument

I want to make the argument that studying poetry through musical settings is one of the best ways of studying it. Depending, of course, on what the poetry is.  It's the same argument that we should read poetry in translation, because translation sheds light on the original. The argument that "all translation is interpretation" means that when we read a translation, we have to think about how this is so (in a way that we don't when reading the original without thinking about its translation.).

So we need a kind of fissure in the wall of the poem to be able to climb it: we can't climb a smooth surface. The fissure is the impetus provided by someone else's intervention (the translator or musical adaptor).

Yet this is hard to do. I have the experience of playing a song for students and .... nothing happens!  They have nothing to say. I need to have rubric, I guess?