When writers compose with vowels and consonants, reflecting the audible world, language becomes music. Hans Emons demonstrates how this interplay evolves from Baroque poetry through the sound magic of Romanticism and the refinement of French Symbolism to the invention of constructed languages in early European modernism and the intentional reduction of the sound repertoire. It becomes clear that language comes closest to music where its openness allows for ambiguities and where sound constructions can be read as poetic entities. This development also includes texts from authors whose writing is implicitly or explicitly oriented towards genuinely musical form and structural principles.