Thus, the uniqueness of Eliot’s musicalisation is that he does not try to make poetry sound like music or look like a musical score. Instead, he makes the elements of language interact according to musical principles, like musical units do, without actually becoming music or losing any of their initial qualities. Due to to this approach, the reader of a poem gets an “extra” – a number of extramusical meanings of words and their combinations. If a poem is not only read but also listened to, the listener can also get the advantage of recognizing (mostly on the unconscious level) sound combinations from his inner “database”, and, if the author intended anything of the kind, of getting more associations, images or bodily reactions that mere reading can provide him with.
It is high time I stated why I consider this type of musicalisation to be more important in the academic sense, especially in our time when Eliot’s epoch is not yet dead and modernism with its elevated style and eternal values is becoming more popular again. The musicalisation I propose as a major direction in the 21st century musico-literary studies is limited in time, limited by the context within which it appeared and is still alive. The associations involved are quite up-to-date (if one does not forget considering jazz), they are the modern reader- and listener-oriented. Jazz has almost become a tradition and stepped back into the niche of classics, but before it has, we need to study all its influence upon arts, including musicalisation of fiction.
In conclusion, I would like to justify my position that musicalisation should be studied. Both encoding and decoding processes are equally important in fiction and music; a composer, or a musically literate writer, while encoding his message, gets an enormous advantage over his colleagues if he is able to predict the way the message is likely to be decoded and perceived. This will also make the response and resonance in public predictable, which means that engaging and commercially successful music or musicalised literature can be created consciously. Geniuses are born once in a very long while, but it is always preferable to have more of really good craftspeople. As to geniuses, like Eliot, their sophisticated intuition (and not calculation, unfortunately), will always serve as an inexhaustible source of guidance for those who write, those who read, and those who criticize.