A remark about payment as a measure of value raises a difficult question for any free cultural project. V2Melody earns nothing, but that is not the same as meaning nothing.

V2Melody isn't a popularity contest. I don't want other people's ratings influencing how you experience a poem, so ratings are private to the person who gives them. Favourites are private too: they're simply bookmarks for poems or tracks you want to remember. The exception is my own collection, Richard's Favorites, which I deliberately share. Read the poem, listen to the music, and make up your own mind.

Arthur Symons's defence of artificial beauty feels unexpectedly modern. If beauty can exist both in the hayfield and the scent-bottle, perhaps the same is true of art made with new tools. What matters is not whether something is natural or artificial, but what we make of it and whether the result moves us.

From now on, most new poems on V2Melody will have one carefully finished musical setting rather than several alternatives. Suno Studio is making it possible to refine each song more deliberately, while giving me the perfect excuse to learn a little music theory along the way.

Elsie Fogerty’s century-old study of music and poetry helped me understand why V2Melody feels instinctively right. Music and words are fundamentally different arts, but that difference allows each to give the other something it lacks—and to help us hear “the sound of the sense”.

V2Melody is free to use, but it is not free to create. The music, servers, software and AI tools that keep the project growing all cost money, and those costs are increasing. Patron support helps me continue creating new musical settings of classic poetry while keeping the entire site free, ad-free and open to everyone. If V2Melody has given you something worthwhile, becoming a patron is one way of helping me keep the garden growing.

I was never any good at maths, yet V2Melody has somehow given me an equation I rather like: NI + AI = V2M. What happens when Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence work together — and can that collaboration be expressed mathematically?

A century-old remark by Maxwell Bodenheim made me wonder how we judge work created with AI. V2Melody has now ventured onto social media, where criticism sometimes arrives from those lurking safely behind a screen. But perhaps the better question is not which tools were used, but whether the thing itself actually achieved what it set out to do.

"Do you think the poet would have liked these musical versions?" It is one of the first questions I was asked after sharing V2Melody on social media. None of us can know the answer, but I often imagine the poets standing quietly beside me while I search for the music hidden within their words.

Every musical setting on V2Melody begins with a poem, but it doesn't end there. Each is accompanied by an image designed to capture the poem's emotional heart and, where possible, a portrait that brings the poet a little closer to our own time.