A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

Art for art's sake

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The belief that art need not serve moral, political, or utilitarian purposes but exists for beauty

Detailed Definition
Art for art's sake is an aesthetic doctrine asserting that poetry should prioritize formal beauty, sensory pleasure, and intrinsic value over moral, political, or didactic functions; championed by 19th-century Symbolists and Decadents, it emphasizes autonomy, craftsmanship, and the sensuous qualities of language.
Example
Example in poetry:
Wilde’s preface to “Dorian Gray”: “All art is quite useless”—championing aesthetic autonomy; Mallarmé’s “L’après-midi d’un faune” prioritizes musicality over message; Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” delights in perception for its own sake; Contemporary “language poets” reject didacticism for sonic and textual play; Art for art’s sake resists moralizing, politics, or utility in favor of pure form.
Additional Notes
Art for art's sake (L'art pour l'art) is the doctrine that art's sole purpose is to be beautiful or expressive, and it needs no moral, political, or utilitarian justification; associated with Aestheticism in the late 19th century.
Also Known As
L’art pour l’art Pure poetry Aesthetic principle Beauty for its own sake Aestheticism Autotelic
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