Sound and Sense Themes
Literature and Writing
"Sound and Sense" takes on writing as its main subject. The speaker, who is both a poet and a literary critic, proposes that great writing is a cultivated art and that sound must fit the content. T...
Ambition and Imitation
This speaker, who is both a critic and poet, just oozes with ambition. With "Sound and Sense," he happily jumps into a major critical debate about the role of nature (think "natural talent") and th...
Rules and Order
The speaker of "Sound and Sense," who seems to be a member of the Poetry Police, plays with the way the meter of a poem can imitate the content of the line. He gets an A+ in prosody, the study of t...