Poetry has always stretched its readers beyond their original conceptions and expectations. To make this happen, poets exercise two skills practiced in many of the arts: magic and music. We can imagine ancient audiences sitting rapt, carried away while listening to a singer recounting the epic heroism of Achilles and Odysseus, and retelling the exploits of El Cid and of Roland and of Beowulf and of Igor's Campaign.

The heart of any poem-the heart of any great writing, prose or poetry-is its magic, its intangible something beyond description, its fleeting glimpse into some wonderful, secret place. Poetry's magic flares from the fires of metaphor and cools in the ice of obscurity.

The problem, of course, is that our society no longer believes in magic. We see in its place a trick which must be exposed. We find ourselves in Oz, always wanting to look behind the curtain and expecting to find the wizard. With any real poem, however, looking behind the curtain reveals no wizard, but instead discloses only another curtain moving slightly in the wind, suggesting something just beyond us, something we cannot box within the narrow confines of our intellect.

The music of poetry should be more obvious. From Homer's probable literalness in "Sing in me, Muse...," and Virgil's "Arms and the man I sing...," to Whitman's more figurative "I sing the body electric...," poets have always described what they do as music. Robert Frost has said that the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

We usually think of music as consisting of two basic components: rhythm and melody. Rhythm, perhaps the most primitive aspect, is pulse or beat, recalling our ancestors drumming on logs with clubs. In English speech, rhythm refers to arrangements of accented or stressed and unaccented or unstressed syllables. Unlike certain other languages, French for example, English hits accents hard. We use accents in our daily speech for emphasis and as part of the normal way we link words together.

Melody relates to pitch and inflection and in speech is a bit more difficult than rhythm to define or describe. All languages have their unique vocal inflections and even within languages, differing dialects carry within them differing patterns of pitch modulation. We grow up and into them as part of learning our mother tongue. Think for a moment-what does Italian sound like? Or Gaelic? Or Swedish? Or Chinese?

Explore these possibilities: have someone else read your poem back to you. Do the lines sing? Ezra Pound has said that poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music (ABC of Reading). Does the reader stumble over certain lines? Does the reader communicate your intent? Are you happy with the sounds of the words? Revise. Revise. Revise.