Personal Entry #4: Music vs. Romanticism

     Music has played a very important role throughout all of history.  However, the key aspect of music is it's lyrics.  Lyrics can relate greatly to the era of it's time.  When looking back through history, musicians wrote lyrics that pertain to the world around them, and what's going on in the moment of it's time.  During the era of Romanticism, poets wrote based off the world around them as well.  Romantics would relate nature to different emotions, in order to express their outlook on life.  Today, musicians do just the same, as they've always have.  Art has always been of great value when studying different time periods.  Take for example, when artists write lyrics, they tend to include a variety of different references or even criticize different people or ideas.  The different outlooks or opinions of artists play a huge role in their music, and the lyrics or poems they write.  The lyrics that are written all throughout history, reflect words of poets during the period of Romanticism and show great importance.  William Wordsworth was one poet, whose words are clearly representative of nature and he uses them to embed a life of many different characteristics.  In one particular poem, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," he describes the feelings he gets when looking into a field of daffodils, "When all at once I saw a crowd; / A host, of golden daffodils" (3-4).  Here, he shows how suddenly he understood how nature is the guideline to the lives we live, with many relations.  It's understood that music today does the same thing.  When artists write good lyrics, they relate things, to get a better understanding of what it is they are referring to.  One song in particular by The Used, describes the feelings of running away through insects and animals, "He crawls like a worm from a bird" (McCracken 12).  The use of a worm struggling to get away from a bird, clearly represents running away.  It's very interesting to see just how similar music is to poets, after understanding the ideas that took place in the period or romanticism.  I think it's important to emphasize that music does in fact have a dramatic relationship to the way poets like Wordsworth wrote during the era of Romanticism.

Works Cited:

Wordsworth, William. N.p.. Web. 15 Apr 2013. <http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww260.html>.

See lyrics to The Used- "The Bird and the Worm" referenced in the entry HERE.