Bard reputation: pop stars pick their favourite poets

To celebrate National Poetry Day, Dave Simpson talks to musicians about the joys – and occasional tribulations – of setting verse to music

    • Jump to comments ()
John Keats and WB Yeats
'Keats and Yeats are on your side' ... poets who have influenced pop. Photograph: Getty/Corbis

Paul Weller

I wasn't taught poetry at school, but after I left I got into Liverpool beat poets such as Brian Patten and Adrian Henri. I related to their use of grand images next to a rainy, shitty street in the suburbs or city. Songs such as God and Trees [on Wake Up the Nation] started out as poems. Down in the Tube Station at Midnight was originally a poem, until the Jam's producer said it would make a great song. People have said that the Jam turned working-class kids on to poetry. Around the time of All Mod Cons people started sending me stuff they'd written in their bedrooms, which normally they'd be too embarrassed to tell anyone about. Some of it was great, so we published it. One fan sent me the Shelley poem The Mask of Anarchy and we used it on the cover of Sound Affects. I'm not some pseudo intellectual – I just thought it was brilliant.

Neil Peart, Rush

In 1975 I was trying to write a song inspired by the dark mood and subtle psychology of the film Citizen Kane, which features the opening lines of Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I looked up the poem and was overwhelmed by its imagery and emotional power. The song Xanadu was taken over by the poem in a way that has never happened since. I added the "adventure travel" aspect to the song's story before I'd travelled further than the rock clubs of North America. I portrayed Coleridge's idea of immortality as a grim curse – Citizen Kane is the opposite: mortality as a punishment. There's a joke that goes, "Rush is what happens when you let the drummer write the songs", which is funny, but of course I only write the lyrics. The line in the song Animate – "daughter of a demon lover" – pays homage to these powerful lines from Kubla Khan: "As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted/ By woman wailing for her demon lover." Now that's rock.

Robert Wyatt

I always have twice as much music as lyrics, so for the Dondestan album I nicked a bunch of verses from Alfie [wife/painter/poet Alfreda Benge]. She said, "You cheeky bugger". She'd done a thing called Catholic Architecture, which was a bitter assault on her Roman Catholic upbringing in Poland. She said my voice made it angelic and wistful, and she hadn't meant that. But on the whole, her words help the music. The cover of the record is a big window looking on to a beach, which depicts where we were staying in Catalonia. An empty winter's beach, rubbish drifting past, a stray dog, African trinket sellers with no one to sell to, and the Africans' footprints disappearing by the next day. Alfie would jot these things down. The challenge was to construct music out of what was free verse – but it was liberating. As a musician, you have to think up constant variations, like jazz players. Recently I sang some Rimbaud over an orchestra, which was great although I've never been a fan. Some musicians love him because he has romantic ideas of death and violence. People who've actually experienced death or violence prefer Vera Lynn.

Mike Scott, the Waterboys

WB Yeats's poems draw me into a kind of otherworld that I love, and I wanted to make the soundtrack to that world. Also, his rhymes scan – it's difficult to set TS Eliot to music. When Yeats's rhyming system doesn't work in music, I've flipped the lines around, as long as I don't change the meaning. I've done about three dozen of his poems [for forthcoming album, An Appointment With Mr Yeats]. I usually have the poetry book at the piano and if the first line suggests a melody I'll continue. When you're touched by a poem you're lifted into a space of the imagination that's rarefied. Something like The Song of Wandering Aengus, "I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head". I can see the guy in the hazel wood, with the moonlight coming through the trees. I've brought my best to it, set it to music which evokes that. When I sing it, I'm there.

Jah Wobble

When people used to tell me I should read William Blake I'd go, "I'm not a fucking hippie". Then an ex-paratrooper friend of mine presented me with a little tattered Penguin and said, "You won't look at this now but eventually you'll love it". And that's exactly what happened. In the mid-90s I'd had two successful albums and I was stretching my wings as an artist. I had this weird music, which needed some narration. I got the tattered Penguin out and realised I'd got Blake wrong. I thought Tyger Tyger was about tiger hunting. It's about conditioning and power. He was a kindred spirit: a nonconformist, a Cockney mystic. At the time, people thought Blake's poetry was too highbrow to be recited over psychedelic music by an east Londoner. One reviewer said I sounded like one of the Mitchell brothers; the record company said, "You're killing your career". The Inspiration of William Blake is one of my most successful albums – it allowed me to set up a label, to work outside the system just like Blake instructed. People say, "You introduced me to Blake" – it's the nicest thing. It was passed on to me and I'm passing on the flame.

Eddi Reader

When I needed to get out of London and return to Scotland, Burns helped find my way home. This beautiful poem Lovely Polly Stewart really got me. I took the tune in my head and started playing with chords and ended up doing a whole Burns album. I was led by some higher truth about it, which I think is in the meter of the words. They jump at you like a rhythm. The poems are like ripe plums, waiting to be picked. I didn't edit anything. I see Burns as a Dylan figure or a punk poet, not from 200 years ago. He ripped the shit out of people, but in a brilliant way. He's not a quiet ghost; once you get involved with him your bedside tables are all Robert Burns. I just know he would have been a total charmer, but cutting. He's always ready to get your knickers off.

John Cooper Clarke

When people say poetry and music I think of beatniks with jazz combos, walking bass lines and some free association Jack Kerouac-style verbiage over the top. When it works, it's a song. It wasn't my idea to put my poetry to music. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The albums made the top 30 and some of it's great, but not all. I prefer solo gigs because you can rethink things on the spot. With musicians you end up doing it like the rehearsal. I wish I could write pop songs. I could go two years without reading any poetry but I can't go two hours without listening to music. I've ended up influencing poets and musicians. Alex Turner [of Arctic Monkeys] discovered me when my stuff was on the GCSE syllabus. It's great. I always wanted to be compulsory.

Josh Ritter

I chose the name Annabel Lee [after Edgar Allan Poe's poem] for my song Another New World because it sounded like a ship. There are similarities – the frozen lover in the poem "sleeps in a tomb by the sounding sea" – but I'm writing in the style of the poetry, it's not directly pulled. I liked the idea of a celebrity explorer, like Livingstone, someone who everybody thought was about discovering something but for him was about finding a place where he could be alone. It feels autobiographical, the feeling that there's never a destination to the travelling and touring. People have noted the meter of the song is the same as the poem, but that's coincidental. I wanted it to be creaky and as boat-like as possible. I actually wrote it in the kitchen in our Brooklyn apartment.

Natalie Merchant

When I had my daughter in 2003 I returned to the nursery rhymes I'd encountered as a child. I'd always loved Edward Lear, and I became fascinated with Victorian children's literature, discovering people such as Charles Causley and Robert Graves. It was really inspiring, and I wanted to make a lively anthology [Leave Your Sleep] of this stuff set to music. Because it's distilled to its essence, poetry is powerful, almost a sacred language. I've been surprised at people's openness – the concerts are three hours long but people have said they loved it, it was new territory, or they were crying. There is a debate over whether lyrics constitute poetry. I'm happy to be a singer-songwriter, but I'm performing at the American Poets Society, alongside seven poet laureates. It feels like being taken into the inner sanctum.

National Poetry Day is today. Fore further details, visit

Today's best video

Latest reviews

Today in pictures