ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with new trends in painting and poetry, which reveal the new sensibilities. Substituting expression and atmosphere for proportion and harmony, painters were more ready to acknowledge the centrality of archetypal patterns in art. The chapter traces the experiments with expressivity in music and the sister arts in order to extrapolate some essential processes and achievements that seemed to be a prerequisite for the later deliberations on art. While the concentration on the powers of music was limited to occasional poetry, experiments with "real" music—the prosodic aspects of the text and its overall rhythmical structure, preoccupied poets throughout the seventeenth century. The attempts in the seventeenth century to wed prosody to rhetorical requirements testify to an adjustment of verse to the subtleties of music and its ability to make sense affective. Eighteenth-century theoretical interest in musical cognition is related to the earlier processes in ways more intimate than one would have supposed.
