You can enjoy and even appreciate a piece of music in as passive a mode as you want or need, as background, or direct Listening To, or as a study object.

Poetry on the other hand has to be experienced directly, words on the page or spoken in some way, making it impossible to ignore the way you can background music. I think that involvement in the poem in order to appreciate it colors our choices of what to read and how to interpret it.

Music ‘”travels” faster than poetry, and if you stop to listen to one passage over and over you often miss the flow of the entire piece. In poetry the speed with which it is absorbed is directly related to how fast we read, interpret, or absorb it. A good poem can be reread over and over, in whole or in part, and depending on the day, the mood, and how one feels, can be interpreted differently every time we read a piece. We set the pace in reading, and retain a sense of control.