This chapter argues the need for emotional history to include the poet’s perspective. A brief reading of a short lyrical poem by Timothy Corsellis (1921–41) is sufficient to show the ways in which certain emotional truths about Munich are communicated through the effects of sound. The insights of the philosophers most widely read at the time – I.A. Richards, R.C. Collingwood, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre – are then briefly presented so as to bring out the connections between emotive language and ethical values. The emotions expressed by the poet, as opposed to those aroused by the journalist, teach us to listen to the hopes and fears of any given generation and direct our attention towards a transhistorical and interdisciplinary distinction between the false note and the true.