The close relationship between poetry and music scarcely needs to be argued. Both are aural modes which employ rhythm, rime, and pitch as major devices; to these the one adds linguistic meaning, connotation, and various traditional figures, and the other can add, at least in theory, all of these plus harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration techniques. In English the two are closely bound historically. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry seems certainly to have been read or chanted to a harpists accompaniment; the verb used in Beowulf for such a performance, the Finn episode, is singan, to sing, and the noun gyd, song. A major source of the lyric tradition in English poetry is the songs of the troubadours. The distance between the gyd in Beowulf and the songs of Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan may seem great, but is one of time rather than aesthetics. The lyric poem as a literary work and the lyrics of a popular song are both still essentially the same thing: poetry. Whether the title of the work be 'Gerontion', or 'Hound Dog', our criteria for evaluating the work must remain the same. The most important prerequisite for both a significant poem and significant lyrics in a popular song is that the writer be faithful to his own personal vision or to the vision of the poem he is writing. Skill and craft for writing poetry are indeed necessary because these are the only means by which a poet can preserve the integrity of this vision in the poem. A poet must not, either because of lack of skill or because of worship of popularity, wealth, or critical acclaim, go outside of his own or his own poems vision—on pain of writing only the derivative or the trivial. Historically, the writers and singers of the lyrics of popular songs have seemed often to be incapable of personal vision, and to have confused both originality and morality with a servile compliance to popular taste. According to the writer, the relationship between poetry and music______.