Initiating a new musical genre, Scriabin opens his Poems collection with this set of two contrasting pieces:

No.1 In F# Major No.2 In D Major

_Poems (_alongside Preludes) will become new fields of experimentation for Scriabin, pushing toward greater modernism and increasingly abstract lyricism. These pieces anticipate many of the discoveries that would later be expanded upon in the revolutionary Sonatas No. 4 and No. 5.

The first, melismatic and utterly graceful, echoes Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 15 in the same luminous key of F♯ Major. It is in complete opposition to the Russian and tempestuous march of the second poem, harmonically unstable and reminiscent of Liszt and Rachmaninoff at their most agitated state.