AustLit

'How does music transcend individual experience? Is music the filter to purify everything? How does everything in the poet become music? Such questions are raised, now and then, by the conscious reader of poetry in general and that of the Australian poet Thomas W. Shapcott in particular. My present research-paper attempts to present an answer for these questions via probing the individuality of Shapcott's poetic experience and how does the poet's personal and experimental musicality as an artistic motif and aesthetic perspective play a key role in purifying language of its lies and its daily impurities. In the first place, my account is apt to find an aesthetic meaning for the action of transcending the individual experience in selected poems written by Shapcott. The philosophical and ritual thought of musicality is interplayed with the aesthetic power of poetry. Both aesthetic energies stem from the individual experience of the poet to transcend the borders of individuality and being absorbed and saturated in the wide pot of human universality. In other words, the poem after being filtered and purified musically and aesthetically is no longer an individual experience owned by its producer only, rather it becomes a human experience for its conscious readers. Music as a motif and meaning, regardless of its technical significance, is controversial in Shapcott's poetic diction. Music, here, is not a mere artistic genre; rather it is a ritualistic and philosophical thought. The paper is to investigate how Shapcott's musicality is constructed on aesthetics of balance and conformity in poetry and life.' (Publication abstract)