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—echoing Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 15 in the same luminous key of F♯ Major—is in complete opposition to the Russian, tempestuous march of the second, harmonically unstable and reminiscent of Liszt at his most agitated.