Musical performances have often inspired poets to write about the varied effects of such performances—in the minds of the audience, in the performer’s own psyche, and in the world beyond the concert hall. While the many intersections of music and literature have led to numerous scholarly studies on resemblances between the forms and the expressive capabilities of the two arts, this essay focuses on how poets have responded to specific performances, some witnessed by the writer and some, from the distant past, imagined. The poems considered here sometimes address the music itself, but more distinctively, they address the ephemeral experiences connected to making music: a performance’s emotional impact, its historical context, its connections to memory, and/or its social significance. In each case, a writer taps poetic resources—rhyme, meter, imagery, allusion—to illuminate subjects such as the psychology of performance and the perceptions of an audience. This survey of selected poems that consider specific musical performances, by writers both widely familiar and lesser known, illuminates a variety of approaches to these themes, as it demonstrates the capacity of music to link past and present, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the concert hall and the world beyond.