Themes

Abstract Far too much has been said in the past about the limited number of themes in the poetry of these songs, as though those themes were more limited than in the songs of Schubert, Hugo Wolf, or the Beatles. With that in mind, the main portion of this chapter is just a list of topics and themes covered in this repertory. The list is not intended to be comprehensive; but it does aim to show both the variety of the topics as well as topics that are surprisingly not covered or covered only in the first half of the century.