POETIC DICTION
POETIC DICTION
A STUDY OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VERSE
BY
THOMAS QUAYLE
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1924_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE AGE OF PROSE AND REASON 1
II. THE THEORY OF DICTION 5
III. THE “STOCK” DICTION 25
IV. LATINISM 56
V. ARCHAISM 80
VI. COMPOUND EPITHETS 102
VII. PERSONIFICATION AND ABSTRACTION 132
VIII. THE DICTION OF POETRY 181
INDEX 207
PREFACE
The studies on which this book is based were begun during my tenure of
the “William Noble” Fellowship in English Literature at the University of
Liverpool, and I wish to thank the members of the Fellowship Committee,
and especially Professor Elton, under whom I had for two years the great
privilege of working, for much valuable advice and criticism. I must also
express my sincere obligation to the University for a generous grant
towards the cost of publication.
POETIC DICTION
CHAPTER I
THE AGE OF PROSE AND REASON
From the time of the publication of the first Preface to the “Lyrical
Ballads” (1798) the poetical language of the eighteenth century, or
rather of the so-called “classical” writers of the period, has been more
or less under a cloud of suspicion. The condemnation which Wordsworth
then passed upon it, and even the more rational and penetrating criticism
which Coleridge later brought to his own analysis of the whole question
of the language fit and proper for poetry, undoubtedly led in the
course of the nineteenth century to a definite but uncritical tendency
to disparage and underrate the entire poetic output of the period, not
only of the Popian supremacy, but even of the interregnum, when the old
order was slowly making way for the new. The Romantic rebels of course
have nearly always received their meed of praise, but even in their
case there is not seldom a suspicion of critical reservation, a sort
of implied reproach that they ought to have done better than they did,
and that they could and might have done so if they had reacted more
violently against the poetic atmosphere of their age. In brief, what
with the Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” and its successive expansions
at the beginning of the century, and what, some eighty years later,
with Matthew Arnold’s calm description of the eighteenth century as
an “age of prose and reason,” the poetry of that period, and not only
the neo-classical portion of it, fared somewhat badly. There could be
no better illustration of the influence and danger of labels and tags;
“poetic diction,” and “age of prose and reason” tended to become a sort
of critical legend or tradition, by means of which eighteenth century
verse, alike at its highest and its lowest levels, could be safely and
adequately understood and explained.
Nowadays we are little likely to fall into the error of assuming that any
one cut and dried formula, however pregnant and apt, could adequately
sum up the literary aspects and characteristics of an entire age; the
contributory and essential factors are too many, and often too elusive,
for the tabloid method. And now that the poetry of the first half or
so of the eighteenth century is in process of rehabilitation, and more
than a few of its practitioners have even been allowed access to the
slopes, at least, of Parnassus, it may perhaps be useful to examine, a
little more closely than has hitherto been customary, one of the critical
labels which, it would almost seem, has sometimes been taken as a sort of
generic description of eighteenth century verse, as if “poetic diction”
was something which suddenly sprang into being when Pope translated
Homer, and had never been heard of before or since.
This, of course, is to overstate the case, the more so as it can hardly
be denied that there is much to be said for the other side. It may
perhaps be put this way, by saying, at the risk of a laborious assertion
of the obvious, that if poetry is to be written there must be a diction
in which to write it—a diction which, whatever its relation to the
language of contemporary speech or prose may be, is yet in many essential
respects distinct and different from it, in that, even when it does not
draw upon a special and peculiar word-power of its own, yet so uses or
combines common speech as to heighten and intensify its possibilities of
suggestion and evocation. If, therefore, we speak of the “poetic diction”
of the eighteenth century, or of any portion of it, the reference ought
to be, of course, to the whole body of language in which the poetry of
that period is written, viewed as a medium, good, bad, or indifferent,
for poetical expression. But this has rarely or never been the case;
it is not too much to say that, thanks to Wordsworth’s attack and its
subsequent reverberations, “poetic diction,” so far as the eighteenth
century is concerned, has too often been taken to mean, “bad poetic
diction,” and it has been in this sense indiscriminately applied to the
whole poetic output of Pope and his school.
In the present study it is hoped, by a careful examination of the poetry
of the eighteenth century, by an analysis of the conditions and species
of its diction, to arrive at some estimate of its value, of what was
good and what was bad in it, of how far it was the outcome of the age
which produced it, and how far a continuation of inherited tradition
in poetic language, to what extent writers went back to their great
predecessors in their search for a fresh vocabulary, and finally, to what
extent the poets of the triumphant Romantic reaction, who had to fashion
for themselves a new vehicle of expression, were indebted to their
forerunners in the revolt, to those who had helped to prepare the way.
It is proposed to make the study both a literary and a linguistic one. In
the first place, the aim will be to show how the poetic language, which
is usually labelled “the eighteenth century style,” was, in certain of
its most pronounced aspects, a reflex of the literary conditions of its
period; in the second place, the study will be a linguistic one, in that
it will deal also with the words themselves. Here the attention will
be directed to certain features characteristic of, though not peculiar
to, the diction of the eighteenth century poetry—the use of Latinisms,
of archaic and obsolete words, and of those compound words by means of
which English poets from the time of the Elizabethans have added some of
the happiest and most expressive epithets to the language; finally, the
employment of abstractions and personifications will be discussed.