THE THEORY OF POETICAL DICTION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
About the time when Dryden was beginning his literary career the
preoccupation of men of letters with the language as a literary
instrument was obvious enough. There was a decided movement toward
simplicity in both prose and poetry, and, so far as the latter was
concerned, it was in large measure an expression of the critical reaction
against the “metaphysical” verse commonly associated with the names
of Donne and his disciples. Furetière in his “Nouvelle Allegorique ou
Histoire des dernier troubles arrivez au Royaume d’Eloquence,” published
at Paris in 1658,[1] expresses the parallel struggle which had been
raging amongst French poets and critics, and the allegory he presents may
be taken to symbolize the general critical attitude in both countries.
Rhetoric, Queen of the Realm of Eloquence, and her Prime Minister, Good
Sense, are represented as threatened by innumerable foes. The troops of
the Queen, marshalled in defence of the Academy, her citadel, are the
accepted literary forms, Histories, Epics, Lyrics, Dramas, Romances,
Letters, Sermons, Philosophical Treatises, Translations, Orations, and
the like. Her enemies are the rhetorical figures and the perversions
of style, Metaphors, Hyperboles, Similes, Descriptions, Comparisons,
Allegories, Pedantries, Antitheses, Puns, Exaggerations, and a host
of others. Ultimately the latter are defeated, and are in some cases
banished, or else agree to serve as dependents in the realm of Eloquence.
We may interpret the struggle thus allegorically expressed by saying that
a new age, increasingly scientific and rational in its outlook, felt
it was high time to analyze critically and accurately the traditional
canons and ideals of form and matter that classical learning, since
the Renaissance, had been able to impose upon literature. This is not
to say that seventeenth century writers and critics suddenly decided
that all the accepted standards were radically wrong, and should be
thrown overboard; but some of them at least showed and expressed
themselves dissatisfied, and, alongside of the unconscious and, as it
were, instinctive changes that reflected the spirit of the age, there
were deliberate efforts to re-fashion both the matter and the manner
of literary expression, to give creative literature new laws and new
ideals.[2]
The movement towards purity and simplicity of expression received its
first definite statement in Thomas Sprat’s “History of the Royal Society,
1667.” One section of the History contains an account of the French
Academy, and Sprat’s efforts were directed towards the formation of a
similar body in England as an arbiter in matters of language and style.
The ideal was to be the expression of “so many _things_ almost in an
equal number of _words_.”[3] A Committee of the Royal Society, which
included Dryden, Evelyn, and Sprat amongst its members, had already met
in 1664, to discuss ways and means of “improving the English tongue,”
and it was the discussions of this committee which had doubtless led up
to Evelyn’s letter to Sir Peter Wyche, its chairman, in June 1665.[4]
Evelyn there gives in detail his ideas of what an English academy,
acting as arbiter in matters of vocabulary and style, might do towards
purifying the language. Twenty-three years later Joseph Glanvill defined
the new ideal briefly in a passage of his “Essay Concerning Preaching”:
“Plainness is a character of great latitude and stands in opposition,
First to _hard words_: Secondly, to _deep and mysterious notions_:
Thirdly, to _affected Rhetorications_: and Fourthly, to _Phantastical
Phrases_.”[5] In short, the ideal to be aimed at was the precise and
definite language of experimental science, but the trend of the times
tended to make it more and more that ideal of poetry also which was
later to be summed up in Dryden’s definition of “wit” as a “propriety of
thoughts and words.”[6]
It is of some little interest perhaps to note that it is not until the
end of the seventeenth century that the word _diction_ definitely takes
on the sense which it now usually bears as a term of literary criticism.
In the preface to “Sylvae, or The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies”
(1685), Dryden even seems to regard the term as not completely
naturalized.[7] Moreover, the critics and poets of the eighteenth century
were for the most part quite convinced that the special language of
poetry had begun with Dryden. Johnson asserted this in his usual dogmatic
fashion, and thus emphasized the doctrine, afterwards vigorously opposed
by Wordsworth, that between the language of prose, and that proper to
poetry, there is a sharp distinction. “There was therefore before the
time of Dryden no poetical diction.... Those happy combinations of words
which distinguished poetry from prose had been rarely attempted; we had
few elegancies or flowers of speech.”[8] Gray moreover, while agreeing
that English poetry had now a language of its own, declared in a letter
to West that this special language was the creation of a long succession
of English writers themselves, and especially of Shakespeare and Milton,
to whom (he asserts) Pope and Dryden were greatly indebted.[9]
It is not very difficult to understand Dryden’s own attitude, as
laid down in the various Prefaces. He is quite ready to subscribe
to the accepted neo-classical views on the language of poetry, but
characteristically reserves for himself the right to reject them,
or to take up a new line, if he thinks his own work, or that of his
contemporaries, is likely to benefit thereby. Thus in the preface to
“Annus Mirabilis” (1666) he boldly claims the liberty to coin words on
Latin models, and to make use of technical details.[10] In his apology
for “Heroic Poetry and Poetic License” (1677) prefixed to “The State of
Innocence and Fall of Man,” his operatic “tagging” of “Paradise Lost,” he
seems to lay down distinctly the principle that poetry demands a medium
of its own, distinct from that of prose,[11] whilst towards the end of
his literary career he reiterates his readiness to enrich his poetic
language from any and every source, for “poetry requires ornament,” and
he is therefore willing to “trade both with the living and the dead for
the enrichment of our native language.”[12] But it is significant that at
the same time he rejects the technical terms he had formerly advocated,
apparently on the grounds that such terms would be unfamiliar to “men and
ladies of the first quality.” Dryden has thus become more “classical,” in
the sense that he has gone over or reverted to the school of “general”
terms, which appeared to base its ideal of expression on the accepted
language of cultured speakers and writers.[13]
Toward the establishment of this principle of the pseudo-classical creed
the theory and practice of Pope naturally contributed; indeed, it has
been claimed that it was in large measure the result of the profound
effect of the “Essay on Criticism,” or at least of the current of thought
which it represents, on the taste of the age.[14] In the Essay, Pope,
after duly enumerating the various “idols” of taste in poetical thought
and diction, clearly states his own doctrine; as the poets’ aim was the
teaching of “True Wit” or “Nature,” the language used must be universal
and general, and neologisms must be regarded as heresies. For Pope, as
for Dryden, universal and general language meant such as would appeal to
the cultured society for whom he wrote,[15] and in his practice he thus
reflected the traditional attitude towards the question of language as a
vehicle of literary expression. A common “poetics” drawn and formulated
by the classical scholars mainly (and often incorrectly) from Aristotle
had established itself throughout Western Europe, and it professed to
prescribe the true relation which should exist between form and matter,
between the creative mind and the work of art.[16]
The critical reaction against these traditional canons had, as we have
noted, already begun, but Pope and his contemporaries are in the main
supporters of the established order, in full agreement with its guiding
principle that the imitation of “Nature” should be the chief aim and end
of art. It is scarcely necessary to add that it was not “Nature” in the
Wordsworthian sense that was thus to be “imitated”; sometimes, indeed,
it is difficult to discover what was meant by the term. But for Pope and
his followers we usually find it to mean man as he lives his life in this
world, and the phrase to “imitate Nature” might thus have an ethical
purpose, signifying the moral “improvement” of man.
But to appreciate the full significance of this “doctrine,” and its
eighteenth century interpretation, it is necessary to glance at the
Aristotelian canon in which it had its origin. For Aristotle poetry
was an objective “imitation” with a definite plan or purpose, of human
actions, not as they are, but as they ought to be. The ultimate aim,
then, according to the _Poetics_, is ideal truth, stripped of the local
and the accidental; Nature is to be improved upon with means drawn from
Nature herself. This theory, as extracted and interpreted by the Italian
and French critics of the Renaissance, was early twisted into a notion
of poetry as an agreeable falsity, and by the end of the seventeenth
century it had come to mean, especially with the French, the imitation
of a selected and embellished Nature, not directly, but rather through
the medium of those great writers of antiquity, such as Homer and Virgil,
whose works provided the received and recognized models of idealized
nature.[17]
As a corollary to this interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of
ideal imitation, there appeared a tendency to ignore more and more the
element of personal feeling in poetry,[18] and to concentrate attention
on the formal elements of the art. This tendency, reinforced by the
authority of the Horatian tag, _ut pictura poesis_ (“as is painting, so
is poetry”), led naturally, and in an ever-increasing degree, to the
formal identification of poetry with painting. Critics became accustomed
to discussing the elements in the art of writing that correspond to the
other elements in pictorial art, such as light, colour, expression, etc.
And as the poet was to be an imitator of accepted models, so also he was
to be imitative and traditional in using poetical colouring, in which
phrase were included, as Dryden wrote, “the words, the expressions, the
tropes and figures, the versification, and all the other elegancies of
sound.”[19] That this parallelism directly encourages the growth of a
set “poetic diction” is obvious; the poet’s language was not to be a
reflection of a genuine emotion felt in the mind for his words, phrases,
and figures of speech, his _operum colores_,[20] he must not look to
Nature but to models. In brief, a poetical _gradus_, compiled from
accepted models, was to be the ideal source on which the poet was to draw
for his medium of expression.
It is not necessary to dwell long on this pseudo-classical confusion of
the two arts, as revealed in the critical writings of Western Europe down
to the very outbreak of the Romantic revolt.[21] In English criticism,
Dryden’s “Parallel” was only one of many. Of the eighteenth century
English critics who developed a detailed parallelism between pictorial
and plastic art on the one hand and poetry on the other, maintaining
that their standards were interchangeable, the most important perhaps
is Spence, whose “Polymetis” appeared in 1747, and who sums the general
position of his fellow-critics on this point in the remark, “Scarce
anything can be good in a poetical description which would appear absurd
if represented in a statue or picture.”[22] The ultimate outcome of this
confusion of poetry and painting found its expression in the last decade
of the eighteenth century in the theory and practice of Erasmus Darwin,
whose work, “The Botanic Garden,” consisted of a “second part,” “The
Loves of the Plants,” published in 1789, two years before its inclusion
with the “first part” the “Economy of Vegetation,” in one volume.
Darwin’s theory of poetry is contained in the “Interludes” between the
cantos of his poems, which take the form of dialogues between the “Poet”
and a “Bookseller.” In the Interlude to Canto 1 of Part II (“The Loves of
the Plants”) he maintains the thesis that poetry is a process of painting
to the eye, and in the cantos themselves he proceeds with great zeal to
show in practice how words and images should be laid on like pigments
from the outside. The young Wordsworth himself, as his early poems show,
was influenced by the theory and practice of Darwin, but Coleridge was
not slow to detect the danger of the elaborate word-painting that might
arise from the confusion of the two arts. “The poet,” he wrote,[23]
“should paint to the Imagination and not to the Fancy.” For Coleridge
Fancy was the “Drapery” of poetic genius, Imagination was its “Soul” or
its “synthetic and magical power,”[24] and he thus emphasized what may be
regarded as one of the chief distinctions between the pseudo-classical,
and the romantic, interpretations of the language of poetry. In its
groping after the “grand style,” as reflected in a deliberate avoidance
of accidental and superficial “particularities,” and in its insistence on
generalized or abstract forms, eighteenth century poetry, or at least the
“neo-classical” portion of it, reflected its inability to achieve that
intensity of imaginative conception which is the supreme need of all art.
The confusion between the two arts of poetry and painting which Coleridge
thus condemned did not, it is needless to say, disappear with the
eighteenth century. The Romanticists themselves finally borrowed that
much-abused phrase “local colour” from the technical vocabulary of the
painter, and in other respects the whole question became merged in the
symbolism of the nineteenth century where literature is to be seen
attempting to do the work of both music and painting.[25]
As regards the language of poetry then—its vocabulary, the actual
_words_ in which it was to be given expression—the early eighteenth
century had first this pseudo-classical doctrine of a treasury of select
words, phrases, and other “ornaments,” a doctrine which was to receive
splendid emphasis and exemplification in Pope’s translation of Homer.
But alongside of this ideal of style there was another ideal which Pope
again, as we have seen, had insisted upon in his “Essay on Criticism,”
and which demanded that the language of poetry should in general
conform to that of cultivated conversation and prose. These two ideals
of poetical language can be seen persisting throughout the eighteenth
century, though later criticism, in its haste to condemn the _gradus_
ideal, has not often found time to do justice to the other.
But, apart from these general considerations, the question of poetic
diction is rarely treated as a thing _per se_ by the writers who, after
Dryden or Pope, or alongside of them, took up the question. There are no
attempts, in the manner of the Elizabethans,[26] to conduct a critical
inquiry into the actual present resources of the vernacular, and its
possibilities as a vehicle of expression. Though the attention is
more than once directed to certain special problems, on the whole the
discussions are of a general nature, and centre round such points as the
language suitable for an Heroic Poem, or for the “imitation” of aspects
of nature, or for Descriptive Poetry, questions which had been discussed
from the sixteenth century onwards, and were not exhausted by the time of
Dr. Johnson.[27]
Goldsmith’s remarks, reflecting as they do a sort of half-way attitude
between the old order and the new, are interesting. Poetry has a language
of its own; it is a species of painting with words, and hence he will
not condemn Pope for “deviating in some instances from the simplicity
of Homer,” whilst such phrases as _the sighing reed_, _the warbling
rivulet_, _the gushing spring_, _the whispering breeze_ are approvingly
quoted.[28] It is thus somewhat surprising to find that in his “Life
of Parnell” he had pilloried certain “misguided innovators” to whose
efforts he attributed the gradual debasing of poetical language since the
happy days when Dryden, Addison, and Pope had brought it to its highest
pitch of refinement.[29] These writers had forgotten that poetry is “the
language of life” and that the simplest expression was the best: brief
statements which, if we knew what Goldsmith meant by “life,” would seem
to adumbrate the theories which Wordsworth was to expound as the Romantic
doctrine.
Dr. Johnson has many things to say on the subject of poetic language,
including general remarks and particular judgments on special points,
or on the work of the poets of whom he treated in his “Lives.” As
might be expected, he clings tenaciously to the accepted standards of
neo-classicism, and repeats the old commonplaces which had done duty for
so long, pays the usual tribute to Waller and Denham, but ascribes the
actual birth of poetical diction to the practice of Dryden. What Johnson
meant by “poetical diction” is clearly indicated; it was a “system of
words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from
the harshness of terms appropriated to different arts,”[30] that is, the
language of poetry must shun popular and technical words, since language
is “the dress of thought” and “splendid ideas lose their magnificence if
they are conveyed by low and vulgar words.”[31] From this standpoint, and
reinforced by his classical preference for regular rhymes,[32] all his
particular judgments of his predecessors and contemporaries were made;
and when this is remembered it is easier to understand, for instance, his
praise of Akenside[33] and his criticism of Collins.[34]
Gray, however, perhaps the most scrupulous and precise of all our poets
with regard to the use of words in poetry,[35] has some pertinent things
to say on the matter. There is his important letter to West, already
referred to, with its dogmatic assertion that “the language of the age
is never the language of poetry,” and that “our poetry has a language
to itself,” an assertion which, with other remarks of Gray, helps to
emphasize the distinction to be made between the two ideals of poetical
diction to be seen persisting through the eighteenth century. It was
generally agreed that there must be a special language for poetry, with
all its artificial “heightening,” “licenses,” and variations from the
language of prose, to serve the purpose of the traditional “Kinds,”
especially the Epic and the Lyric. This is the view taken by Gray, but
with a difference. He does not accept the conventional diction which
Pope’s “Homer” had done so much to perpetuate, and hence he creates a
poetic language of his own, a glittering array of words and phrases,
blending material from varied sources, and including echoes and
reminiscences of Milton and Dryden.
The second ideal of style was that of which, as we have seen, the canons
had been definitely stated by Pope, and which had been splendidly
exemplified in the satires, essays, and epistles. The aim was to
reproduce “the colloquial idiom of living society,”[36] and the result
was a plain, unaffected style, devoid of the ornaments of the poetic
language proper, and, in its simplicity and directness, equally suitable
for either poetry or prose. Gray could make use of this vehicle of
expression, whenever, as in “The Long Story,” or the fragmentary
“Alliance of Education and Government,” it was suitable and adequate
for his purpose; but in the main his own practice stood distinct from
both the eighteenth century ideals of poetical language. Hence, as it
conformed to neither of the accepted standards, Goldsmith and Johnson
agreed in condemning his diction, which was perhaps in itself sufficient
proof that Gray had struck out a new language for himself.
Among the special problems connected with the diction of poetry to which
the eighteenth century critics directed their attention, that of the
use of archaic and obsolete words was prominent. It had been one of the
methods by which the Elizabethans had hoped to enrich their language, but
contemporary critics had expressed their disapproval, and it was left to
Jonson, in this as in other similar matters, to express the reasonable
view that “the eldest of the present and the newest of the past language
is best.”[37] Dryden, when about to turn the “Canterbury Tales” “into our
language as it is now refined,”[38] was to express a similar common-sense
view. “When an ancient word,” he said, with his Horace no doubt in his
mind, “for its sound and significancy deserves to be revived, I have that
reasonable veneration for antiquity to restore it. All beyond this is
superstition.”
A few years later the long series of Spenserian imitations had begun,
so that the question of the poetic use of archaic and obsolete words
naturally came into prominence. Pope, as might be expected, is to be
found among the opposition, and in the “Dunciad” he takes the opportunity
of showing his contempt for this kind of writing by a satiric gird,
couched in supposedly archaic language:
But who is he in closet close y-pent
Of sober face with learned dust besprent?
Right well mine eyes arede the myster wight
On parchment scraps y-fed and Wormius hight—
(Bk. III, ll. 185-8)
an attack which is augmented by the ironic comment passed by “Scriblerus”
in a footnote.[39] Nevertheless, when engaged on his translation of Homer
he had an inclination, like Cowper, towards a certain amount of archaism,
though it is evident that he is not altogether satisfied on the point.[40]
In Gray’s well-known letter to West, mentioned above, there is given a
selection of epithets from Dryden, which he notes as instances of archaic
words preserved in poetry. Gray, as we know, had a keen sense of the
value of words, and his list is therefore of special importance, for
it appears to show that words like _mood_, _smouldering_, _beverage_,
_array_, _wayward_, _boon_, _foiled_, etc., seemed to readers of 1742
much more old-fashioned than they do to us. Thirty years or so later
he practically retracts the views expressed in this earlier letter, in
which he had admirably defended the use in poetry of words obsolete in
the current language of the day. “I think,” he wrote to James Beattie,
criticizing “The Minstrel,”[41] “that we should wholly adopt the language
of Spenser or wholly renounce it.” And he goes on to object to such
words as _fared_, _meed_, _sheen_, etc., objections which were answered
by Beattie, who showed that all the words had the sanction of such
illustrious predecessors as Milton and Pope, and who added that “the
poetical style in every nation abounds in old words”—exactly what Gray
had written in his letter of 1742.
Johnson, it need hardly be said, was of Pope’s opinion on this matter,
and the emphatic protest which he, alarmed by such tendencies in the
direction of Romanticism, apparent not only in the Spenserian imitations,
but still more in such signs of the times as were to culminate in Percy’s
“Reliques,” the Ossianic “simplicities” of Macpherson, and the Rowley
“forgeries,” is evidence of the strength which the Spenserian revival had
by then gained. “To imitate Spenser’s fiction and sentiments can incur no
reproach,” he wrote: “but I am very far from extending the same respect
to his diction and his stanza.”[42] To the end he continued to express
his disapproval of those who favoured the “obsolete style,” and, like
Pope, he finally indulges in a metrical fling at the innovators:
Phrase that time has flung away
Uncouth words in disarray;
Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode and Elegy and Sonnet.[43]
Goldsmith too had his misgivings. “I dislike the imitations of our
old English poets in general,” he wrote with reference to “The
Schoolmistress,” “yet, on this minute subject, the antiquity of the style
produces a very ludicrous solemnity.”[44]
On this matter of poetic archaism, the point of view of the average
cultured reader, as distinct from the writer, is probably accurately
represented in one of Chesterfield’s letters. Writing to his son,[45] he
was particularly urgent that those words only should be employed which
were found in the writers of the Augustan age, or of the age immediately
preceding. To enforce his point he carefully explained to the boy the
distinction between the pedant and the gentleman who is at the same
time a scholar; the former affected rare words found only in the pages
of obscure or antiquated authors rather than those used by the great
classical writers.
This was the attitude adopted in the main by William Cowper, who, after
an early enthusiasm for the “quaintness” of old words, when first engaged
on his translation of Homer, later repented and congratulated himself
on having, in his last revisal, pruned away every “single expression of
the obsolete kind.”[46] But against these opinions we have to set the
frankly romantic attitude of Thomas Warton, who, in his “Observations
on the Faerie Queen” (1754), boldly asserts that “if the critic is not
satisfied, yet the reader is transported,” whilst he is quite confident
that Spenser’s language is not so difficult and obsolete as it is
generally supposed to be.[47]
Here and there we also come across references to other devices by which
the poet is entitled to add to his word-power. Thus Addison grants the
right of indulging in coinages, since this is a practice sanctioned by
example, especially by that of Homer and Milton.[48] Pope considered that
only such of Homer’s compound epithets as could be “done literally into
English without destroying the purity of our language” or those with good
literary sanctions should be adopted.[49] Gray, however, enters a caveat
against coinages; in the letter to Beattie, already quoted, he objects to
the word “infuriated,” and adds a warning not to “make new words without
great necessity; it is very hazardous at best.”
Finally, as a legacy or survival of that veneration for the “heroic
poem,” which had found its latest expression in Davenant’s “Preface to
Gondibert”[50] (1650), the question of technical words is occasionally
touched upon. Dryden, who had begun by asserting that general terms were
often a mere excuse for ignorance, could later give sufficient reasons
for the avoidance of technical terms,[51] and it is not surprising to
find that Gray was of a similar opinion. In his criticism of Beattie’s
“Minstrel” he objects to the terms _medium_ and _incongruous_ as being
words of art, which savour too much of prose. Gray, we may presume, did
not object to such words because they were not “elegant,” or even mainly
because they were “technical” expressions. He would reject them because,
for him, with his keen sense of the value of words, they were too little
endowed with poetic colour and imagination. When these protests are
remembered, the great and lasting popularity of “The Shipwreck” (1762) of
William Falconer, with its free employment of nautical words and phrases,
may be considered to possess a certain significance in the history of the
Romantic reaction. The daring use of technical terms in the poem must
have given pleasure to a generation of readers accustomed mainly to the
conventional words and phrases of the accepted diction.
When we review the “theory” of poetical language in the eighteenth
century, as revealed in the sayings, direct and indirect, of poets and
critics, we feel that there is little freshness or originality in the
views expressed, very little to suggest the changes that were going on
underneath, and which were soon to find their first great and reasoned
expression. Nominally, it would seem that the views of the eighteenth
century “classicists” were adequately represented and summed up in those
of Johnson, for whom the ideal of poetical language was that which Dryden
had “invented,” and of which Pope had made such splendid use in his
translation of Homer. In reality, the practice of the “neo-classical”
poets was largely influenced by the critical tenets of the school to
which they belonged, especially by that pseudo-Aristotelian doctrine
according to which poetry was to be an “imitation” of the best models,
whilst its words, phrases, and similes were to be such as were generally
accepted and consecrated by poetic use. It was this conventionalism,
reinforced by, as well as reflecting, the neo-classical outlook on
external nature, that resulted in the “poetic diction” which Wordsworth
attacked, and it is important to note that a similar stereotyped language
is to be found in most of the contemporary poetry of Western Europe, and
especially in that of France.[52]
We need not be surprised, therefore, to find that neither Johnson, nor
any of his “classical” contemporaries, appears to attach any importance
to the fact that Pope in his essays and epistles had set up a standard
of diction, of which it is not too much to say that it was an ideal
vehicle of expression for the thoughts and feelings it had to convey.
So enamoured were they of the pomp and glitter of the “Homer” that
they apparently failed to see in this real “Pope style” an admirable
model for all writers aiming at lucidity, simplicity, and directness of
thought. We may see this clearly by means of an instructive comparison
of Johnson’s judgments on the two “Pope styles.” “It is remarked by
Watts,” he writes, “that there is scarcely a happy combination of words
or a phrase poetically elegant in the English language which Pope has not
inserted into his version of Homer.”[53] On the other hand, he is perhaps
more than unjust to Pope’s plain didactic style when he speaks of the
“harshness of diction,” the “levity without elegance” of the “Essay on
Man.”[54]
It was not until the neo-classical poetry was in its death-agony that
we meet with adequate appreciation of the admirable language which
Pope brought to perfection and bequeathed to his successors. “The
familiar style,” wrote Cowper to Unwin,[55] “is of all the styles the
most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose
without being prosaic—to marshal the words of it in such an order as they
might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker,
yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming
to displace a syllable for the sake of the rhyme, is one of the most
arduous tasks a poet can undertake.” The “familiar style,” which Cowper
here definitely characterizes, was in its own special province as good
a model as was the beautiful simplicity of Blake when “poetical poetry”
had once more come into its own; and it is important to remember that
this fact received due recognition from both Wordsworth and Coleridge.
“The mischief,” wrote the former,[56] “was effected not by Pope’s
satirical and moral pieces, for these entitle him to the highest place
among the poets of his class; it was by his ‘Homer.’... No other work
in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry.” And
Coleridge, too, called attention to the “almost faultless position and
choice of words” in Pope’s original compositions, in comparison with
the absurd “pseudo-poetic diction” of his translations of Homer.[57]
The “Pope style” failed to produce real poetry—poetry of infinite and
universal appeal, animated with personal feeling and emotion not merely
because of its preference for the generic rather than the typical, but
because its practitioners for the most part lacked those qualities of
intense imagination in which alone the highest art can have its birth.