Is there a gulf between music and verse? Not according to Melbourne-based writer James Antoniou, who examines how the two art forms have interlocked through the ages and explores their collaborative potential.

Sappho and Alcaeus (1881) painted by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Music is older than language and being pre-linguistic, it is attuned to a deeply somatic – even a primal – part of us. When Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva likened infant or ‘pre-Oedipal’ speech patterns to poetic prosody, she was picking up on the rhythmic qualities, the secret music, that child-speak seems effortlessly to possess. Poetry often aims to recreate that same music, and it’s no surprise to find many poetic forms have their roots in an oral tradition.

Indeed, the concept of poetry as a purely literary art was probably inconceivable before Late Antiquity....