In the preceding chapter I examined the relationship between music and the social languages of the post-World War I American metropolis in the popular songs of George and Ira Gershwin. The very focus on the collaboration of these brothers underlines, I hope, the sense of the public and popular nature of the American musical theater. In this chapter, I examine the private nature of that music in describing the relationship between music and desire in Cole Porter. Such privacies, I will suggest, are no less “popular” than public music: indeed, they help delineate the felt sense of self and subjectivity which a population (and a generation) share; they create what Raymond Williams called “the felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities [of life] combined into a way of thinking and feeling,” what he repeatedly describes as a “structure of feeling.” Cultural modernism itself can be understood in terms of such a structure of feeling as well as historical occurrences and social formations. Desire itself, I am arguing, is such a “structure of feeling,” and therefore it is strangely impersonal, emerging in performance, oddly “popular.” Whether its formation – its “structure” – is historically specific as Williams suggests is difficult to determine precisely because we are inhabited by it, constantly performing it, which makes our desire – and our pleasure – seem simply “natural” and simply part of being human.