ABSTRACT
Ursula Vaughan Williams reveals that her husband was absorbed with the poetry of Walt Whitman as early as 1903. Vaughan Williams's mastery of prosody, Michael Kennedy writes, 'it is still a matter for wonder that Whitman's words should have found music which fits them so naturally, the speech-rhythms having an inevitable musical cadence'. In version after version, Vaughan Williams struggled to match the intensity of Whitman's vision. Whitman's 'fresh thoughts' appealed to many composers during Vaughan Williams's formative years. Vaughan Williams spent seven years creating A Sea Symphony; it was his first published large-scale symphonic composition, created in the optimistic first decade of the twentieth century. While he never revisited the genre of the choral symphony, Vaughan Williams built a capacious symphonic legacy on the foundation of A Sea Symphony.
