Art & Creativity Quote by Rita Dove

Rita Dove isn’t making a tidy definition of poetry so much as revealing her operating system: poetry is the craft of catching attention, and attention is caught through sound. “Enthralls” is the tell. It frames language and music not as lofty cultural artifacts but as technologies of captivation - forces that grab the body before the mind can start grading the experience. Dove’s intent is quietly polemical: she’s pushing back against a classroom habit of treating poems like coded messages that yield their “meaning” once decoded. For her, meaning arrives riding on pleasure.

The pairing of “language and music” also signals a refusal to keep intellect and emotion in separate rooms. Language is thought, argument, history, the social charge of diction. Music is pattern, tempo, breath, the part of a poem you can’t paraphrase without losing it. Dove’s subtext is that poetry lives in the friction between those two: the semantic and the sonic, what’s said and how it lands. That’s why she “try[ies] to show” - not merely to state. Showing implies performance: meter, line breaks, vowel color, repetition, the deliberate choreography of emphasis.

Context matters here. Dove came of age amid late-20th-century battles over what counts as “accessible” poetry, over whether lyric beauty is a political evasion or a political tool. As a Black woman poet who has moved between formal constraint and narrative clarity, she stakes out a position: musicality isn’t decoration. It’s an engine of persuasion, memory, and intimacy - the way a poem earns the right to be heard.