There is verse which is directly melodic, which seems to sing rather than speak. Basil Bunting is a master of this….

Bunting perhaps excels all living poets in expressing emotional complexity through apparently simple—not so very simple—melodic artifice.

But there is [another] sense in which poetry can be musical, in imitating not the sound but the structure of music…. Bunting's most famous song poem, Briggflatts, is … constructed this way in five sections. The first two, spring and summer, mount to a false climax; there is a high and narrow real climax in the non-seasonal third; in the fourth and fifth, autumn and winter, the climaxes gently decline. The conception was not merely abstractly musical, but had in mind the expressiveness of music….

What is clear is that, however much he feels that sound comes first, Bunting is incapable of writing a syntactically incorrect sentence or a...