"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me"
About this Quote
Marilyn Hacker is naming the engine of her poetry without romanticizing it: the poem as a site of pressure, not pure expression. “Sound” is the old seduction of verse - rhyme, meter, echo, the body’s instinct to remember what repeats. “Syntax” is the mind’s counterforce - the grammar that insists on logic, sequence, and clarity. Put them in a tug-of-war and you get what she calls “musical tension”: the ear wanting one thing, the sentence insisting on another. That friction is where meaning stops being delivered and starts being made.
The intent is almost polemical in its quiet way. Hacker, a fiercely formal poet in a late-20th-century landscape that often treated free verse as the default mark of seriousness, frames technique as inquiry. She’s not chasing ornament; she’s chasing the moment when form complicates thought. A rhyme can tempt the line toward a predictable landing; a knotted syntax can refuse that comfort, forcing the reader to re-hear the line, to re-parse it, to dwell.
Subtext: music isn’t innocence. In Hacker’s work - shaped by feminist politics, queer life, and a translator’s attentiveness to structure - the “musical” can be a lure that risks smoothing over conflict. Syntax becomes the ethical check on prettiness, a way of keeping experience jagged, social, and specific. Context matters: she’s writing after the big modernist break with traditional forms, choosing constraint not as nostalgia but as a contemporary tool. The tension is the point because it models consciousness itself: desire pulling one way, sense pulling another, the poem holding both without resolving them too neatly.
The intent is almost polemical in its quiet way. Hacker, a fiercely formal poet in a late-20th-century landscape that often treated free verse as the default mark of seriousness, frames technique as inquiry. She’s not chasing ornament; she’s chasing the moment when form complicates thought. A rhyme can tempt the line toward a predictable landing; a knotted syntax can refuse that comfort, forcing the reader to re-hear the line, to re-parse it, to dwell.
Subtext: music isn’t innocence. In Hacker’s work - shaped by feminist politics, queer life, and a translator’s attentiveness to structure - the “musical” can be a lure that risks smoothing over conflict. Syntax becomes the ethical check on prettiness, a way of keeping experience jagged, social, and specific. Context matters: she’s writing after the big modernist break with traditional forms, choosing constraint not as nostalgia but as a contemporary tool. The tension is the point because it models consciousness itself: desire pulling one way, sense pulling another, the poem holding both without resolving them too neatly.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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