One has in the past done one's darndest to persuade oneself that Bunting does not really mean what he says when he argues, if it can be called argument, that poetry is pure sound. (p. 56)

The analogy of poetry with music is a dangerous one for two basic reasons: first, poetry has severe limits in pitch, key, tone, and range; nor can it orchestrate; second, it does not have notes devoid of referrents as music largely does. Words mean—if the poet discards their meaning the hearing mind puts them back, just as it picks up echoes of its own tongue in an unknown foreign speech…. Another thing that makes it a dangerous analogy is that users slip between two aspects of music: one as a set of scale-systems of sounds, the other as a set of structural principles like sonata-form. This use of musical form is ultimately a mere metaphorical usage. There's a touch of both aspects in Briggflatts. In general, the musical approach is nearly always a form of anti-rationalism. (p. 58)

My feeling is with Briggflatts … that both in its use of sound and its gesture towards musical structure it is rather obvious and not a little contrived. For in insisting on musicality it invites comparison with some of the finest poets who naturally excelled in that field: Chaucer; Shakespeare; Milton; Tennyson; Pound and Eliot, the closest comparison actually being The Four Quartets which clearly by contrast illustrates a coarsening in Briggflatts of the musical tradition.

The most obvious way in which Briggflatts is no step forward in the tradition is the poverty of its use of syntax. The poem is tediously dominated by the simple sentence, extended by appositional developments to subject and object. In addition to this the custom of English in excising a repeated subject pronoun makes this appositional effect sound worse. Along with these appositions goes a considerable reliance upon present participles.

This may be defended by the musical argument that the present tense must be used to make the narrative time of the poem appear to match the duration of the piece as music. That may be so but the danger of syntactical boredom should have been averted. (p. 62)

What is ultimately the objection to the musical approach is that it is used as an excuse or cover for a growing distance from speech and the continued use of rather bardic poetic devices like apostrophising an untenable tenor bull. It is also an uneconomic way of writing. Briggflatts seems longer than its matter requires.

Briggflatts errs away from Eliot's suggestion that the music of poetry must arise out of speech. (p. 64)

[Bunting's] peak diagram, his Scarlatti, and his insistence upon music have been ways to enable him to extrude the matter of Briggflatts, some of which, he suggests in interview, lies too deep in the subconscious for his rational explication. Such crutches have their uses. Bunting's error is his persistence in trying to give poetry the same crutches. Briggflatts is a failure as a musical poem of any stature and a poor foundation on which new poets might build. (pp. 64-5)

In opposing Bunting's theory of the music of poetry, pure and simple, I am not opposing the idea of musical verse. Of course poetry must be musical but it must be more than just music—as that alone it is left standing by music proper. (p. 65)