Richard Taruskin has observed that Stravinsky's habit of distorting natural declamation in his text settings is not the result of oversight or incompetence, but is an integral part of the composer's modernist esthetic stance. Such “wrong” settings subvert the natural flow of language in the same way that Stravinsky subverts the conventional flow of melody, harmony or rhythm. This paper will demonstrate a method of analyzing Stravinsky's setting of text so as to understand better where and how he subverts natural declamation, and perhaps more importantly, where he does not. In his opera The Rake's Progress (1948- 51), Stravinsky follows the natural sense of the text more closely than in any of his previous vocal works. This can be seen in the way he privileges the narrative function of the text, an approach no doubt influenced by the dramaturgy of 18th-century opera. Stravinsky's new receptivity to the expressiveness of language is also evident in numerous individual settings. Building on a close examination of the sketches for the opera, this paper analyzes examples of Stravinsky's seemingly new attitude to setting words - a task that the composer claimed was “calculated to display Wystan Auden's magnificent English text.”