Why are most Japanese songs and poems in normal form?


You would think that sentence structure would matter in songs and poems,
especially when they have directed or dedicated lyrics, e.g. to a stranger,
the president, someone of higher status.

Alternatively, is 丁寧語, 尊敬語, or 謙譲語 even remotely usable in lyrical art?

I am speculating that this is related to polite language impeding the relaying
of emotion. There's [a somehow related
article](http://www.tofugu.com/2013/09/13/you-cant-have-your-keigo-and-eat-it-
too/comment-page-1/) discussing if 警護 makes communication difficult, which is
another question on its own.




Wild speculation here, but the Japanese polite conjugations seem especially
unsuitable for singing. です and ます sound weird with a fully-voiced す taking a
full mora, yet Japanese poetry is very strict with moras - almost always, for
example, っ and ん do take a full note in songs.

In addition, they take up lots of space, which is really at a premium with
Japanese songs, as the verse form (5/7/5...) was influenced by the **much**
more concise Classical Chinese language (albeit with a twist; CC poems usually
are constant 5 or 7 lines); in fact when fantranslating anime songs into
English, one big problem seems to be how little semantic content the lyrics
have, due to the low information rate of Japanese (words are longer): I would
often need to make up meanings, such as by translating 白い雲 as "dazzling white
clouds" etc.

