‘Read some Byron, Shelly and Keats
Recited it over a Hip-Hop beat
I’m having trouble saying what I mean
With dead poets and drum machines’

Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘These Words’ provokes much mirth from literature scholars. But despite the occasional cringe, song lyrics have traditionally had a close relationship with poetry. Evelyn Waugh enjoyed Cole Porter’s ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ as much as ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, while countless modern musicians, from Paul McCartney to Tupac Shakur, have published poems.

When once rock singers such as Patti Smith or Jim Morrison would search for gravitas by reaching for lines from Blake or Rimbaud, now it is poets who seem eager to return the favour. Former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has long campaigned for Bob Dylan’s lyrics to be studied as part of the literature syllabus, while live literature evenings frequently mix the two forms together. Meanwhile award-winning poets like David Harsent and Sean O’Brien have been lauded for their libretti for recent operas.

With the popularity of rap and confessional singer-songwriters having blurred the lines between poetry and lyrics, can we separate the two as art-forms? Many would argue that the words don’t matter if the tune is good: but what are the possibilities or limitations for wordsmiths in a generation reared on pop and dominated by the iPod?