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Cole Porter's best songs (and there are so
many!) celebrate the alchemical marriage of the head and the heart: playfully, when the head's wit meets the heart's delight; passionately,
when the head's torment sings out of the heart's despair. And in his greatest moments, Porter
simply merges head and heart, word and note, in the quasi-
divine plane of imagination, where doubt dissolves in ecstasy. He can hardly have been aware of Rumi, but the great
13th-century Sufi would surely have given rapturous assent to these lines from
Broadway Melody of 1940: "And so, when wise men say to met That Love's young dream never comes
true/ to prove that even wise men can be wrong/I concentrate on You."
-- Stephen Mo Hanan, reviewing William McBrien's Cole Porter
in the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review
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