So what’s the deal? More than prose, poetry is inherently about the musicality of language: its sound and rhythm and rhymes, its capacity to please the ear even as it evokes an image or conveys its desired meaning. Good poets exploit that musicality the same way good rappers do, favoring one word over another for the way it interacts with the words around it. But poets, unlike rappers, are not generally performers, and it shows when they recite their work for an audience. Rather than trusting the music of their language to sing for itself, they try to impose an outside music on it, as if they were performing Handel’s “Messiah” to the tune of “Old MacDonald.”