SOURCE: "'Musical Possibilities': Music, Memory, and Composition in the Poetry of Donald Justice," in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 18, Nos. 1-2, 1985, pp. 57-66.

In the essay below, De Jong discusses the significance of music to Justice's poetry, noting his use of rhyme, assonance, consonance, and repetition and the way in which music has served as subject or allegory in his poems.

For centuries authors, composers, and critics have been exploring the parallels between the "sister arts" of music and literature. As Calvin S. Brown dryly observes, the study of musico-literary correspondences holds "a fatal attraction for the dilettante, the faddist and the crackpot." To suggest, then, that Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Donald Justice has been influenced by music is to incur a certain risk. Being called a faddist or a dilettante would fracture no bones, only pride, and an academic becomes accustomed to being thought a crackpot, by students if not by...