SOURCE: Wimsatt, William K. Jr. and Cleanth Brooks. “Poetic Diction: Wordsworth and Coleridge.” In Literary Criticism: A Short History, pp. 339-62. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.

[In the following excerpt, Wimsatt and Brooks provide an historical account of Wordsworth and Coleridge's critique of the poetic diction of earlier writers.]

At a later point in this narrative (chapter 29) we shall have occasion to consider the question how far a close verbal analysis of poetry may fall short of doing justice to the more massive structural features of such works as novels, epics, dramas. Literary criticism of the mid-20th century in America has been raising that question with an insistence which might even be taken at this point as a discouragement to our dignifying the episode of 18th-century “poetic diction” and the Wordsworthian condemnation of it with very much notice. Both “poetic diction” and the reaction against it, however, stand out conspicuously in critical history, and we choose to dwell upon them with some deliberation. The concept of “poetic diction” is at least a handy one both for the theorist and for the literary historian. It has at least the advantage that it reduces to a nearly definable and testable form a good many other problems of literary criticism. “Poetic diction” is a good small-scale model of the larger problems.

II

The issue of poetic diction had been growing upon the English literary consciousness steadily since about the time of Chaucer, that is, since the beginning of Renaissance English literature, and with special intensity since the time of Spenser. A new linguistic consciousness, the new linguistic expansiveness of the Renaissance nation, promoted the learned enrichment of vernacular expression and produced a plethora of words.¹ A somewhat different, but closely related, spirit of self-conscious artistry promoted a specifically poetic diction. Such a diction grew rapidly with the tradition of an important poetry in an important language and the development and refinement of this poetry through several generations of poets and critics.

Precisely what kinds of poetic diction were invented and handed on by the succession of English poets and translators—by Spenser, Fairfax, Sylvester, Sandys, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Collins, Gray? This is a complicated question. One may distinguish minor and major strains. Some kinds of poetic diction (like the Petrarchan flowers that flourished in the lesser Elizabethan sonneteers and were twined with graceful levity by Spenser and Sidney, or the rustic dialect words of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender) did not continue into the neo-classic era. Others grew stronger and were consolidated in the English tradition continuously up to Wordsworth's time. Without making a long excursion into what is a matter rather of directly poetic than of critical history, the historian of poetic theory may well note some of the main kinds of poetic diction which became fixed in the 18th-century complex. Slightly to one side perhaps belongs the archaic, melancholy, and variously romantic strain invented by Spenser for the Faerie Queene² and lavishly repeated in the 18th-century Spenserian imitations. A more distinctly classical diction can be described under three main grammatical headings: (1) With regard to etymology, the most pronounced trend was the continuation of Renaissance Latinism, especially as this was helped by the rise of scientific or “philosophic” ideas and vocabulary and by Ovidian and Virgilian meanings in the translations of Dryden and his predecessors. (2) With regard to parts of speech, the most pronounced trend was the increase of adjectives, both Latin derivatives and a large crowd of scientific and poetic coinages bearing the English termination -y.³ The growth of empirical observation during all this period had an understandably inflationary effect upon descriptive language. (3) With regard to syntax and logical relation, the most pronounced trend was the coupling of the adjective with the noun in a kind of glossy stock phrase, or periphrase, which was sometimes epithetical and redundant, in the Homeric style, sometimes more abstractly definitional (by genera and properties) in a way that is nowadays said to have reflected a philosophy and science of orderly classes in a stable cosmos.⁴

The definitional type of periphrase stood in a fairly close relation to the standard of universality and abstraction which we have discussed in our last chapter. And the taste for the universal entailed, as we have suggested, a certain mistrust of particularity, the imputation to this of lowness, meanness, or vulgarity. The classical high, middle, and low styles which we have seen transferred by late classical theory from oratory to poetry (becoming the epic, georgic, and eclogue styles)⁵ appear by the mid-18th century to have been simplified into the polar concepts of the lofty and the low. Thus Addison could be guilty of saying:

Since it often happens that the most obvious Phrases, and those which are used in ordinary Conversation, become too familiar to the Ear, and contract a kind of Meanness by passing through the Mouths of the Vulgar, a Poet should take particular Care to guard himself against Idiomatick Ways of Speaking.

—Spectator No. 285

And Pope:

It must also be allowed that there is a majesty and harmony in the Greek language, which greatly contribute to elevate and support the narration. But I must also observe, that this is an advantage grown upon the language since Homer's time: for things are removed from vulgarity by being out of use; and if the words we could find in any present language were equally sonorous or musical in themselves, they would still appear less poetical and uncommon than those of a dead one, from this only circumstance, of being in every man's mouth.⁶

And Samuel Johnson, in a Rambler passage on Shakespeare, erected one of the most notorious monuments to the lofty taste.

Words become low by the occasions to which they are applied, or the general character of them who use them. …

                                                            Come, thick night!
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, Hold, hold!

… the efficacy of this invocation is destroyed by the insertion of an epithet now seldom heard but in the stable, and dun night may come or go without any other notice than contempt … [the] sentiment is weakened by the name of an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employments. … Who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt peeping through a blanket?

—Rambler No. 168

The following positive defense of a special poetic diction is provided by Gray.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry; except among the French, whose verse, where the thought and image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose. Our poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself, to which almost everyone that has written has added something by enriching it with foreign idioms and derivations: nay, sometimes words of their own composition or invention. Shakespeare and Milton have been great creators this way; and no one more licentious than Pope or Dryden, who perpetually borrow expressions from the former.⁷

The precise terms “diction” and “poetic diction” seem to have arisen somewhat earlier, in the high Augustan era. Dryden uses “diction” with an apology for Latinism, in the preface to Sylvae, 1685. The first person to use the term “poetic diction” is apparently Dennis, in his Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (ch. V), 1701. In his Preface to the Iliad, 1715, Pope wrote: “We acknowledge him [Homer] the father of poetical diction.”⁸ As with so many other classic themes, Samuel Johnson wrote a retrospective last word.

There was … 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.⁹

III

Two kinds of protest against poetic diction have occurred: that of the classicist, hostile to pedantry and affectation, appealing to polite idiom, the educated spoken word; and that of the romantic, hostile to the same things, but appealing to the primitive, the naive, the directly passionate, the natural spoken word. The first of these protests occurs intermittently throughout the classical and Renaissance eras. It is the voice of Horace (usus quem penes arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi), of Ben Jonson (“Pure and neat Language I love, yet plaine and customary”),¹⁰ of Dryden in his preface to Annus Mirabilis (“'Tis not the jerk or sting of an epigram … nor the jingle of a more poor paronomasia”), of Pope in his Essay:

False eloquence, like the prismatic glass,
Its gaudy colours spreads on ev'ry place;
The face of Nature we no more survey,
All glares alike, without distinction gay.

II, 311-14

It is the latter-day voice of Goldsmith, in his Life of Parnell,¹¹ complaining about the “pristine barbarity” of contemporary Spenserians and Miltonists.

The classical protest is more or less unremitting, but it is at the same time moderate, good-tempered, hardly revolutionary. The same Goldsmith who accuses the archaizers of “vainly imagining that the more their writings are unlike prose the more they resemble poetry” will write an essay entitled “Poetry Distinguished from Other Writing.” “Certain words” are “particularly adapted to the poetical expression.” Jonathan Swift was a consistent classical champion of good prose sense and the idiomatic norm, but the following passage from his satiric Apollo's Edict, 1721, illustrates the ambiguity of the classic stand:

Your tragick Heroes shall not rant,
Nor Shepherds use poetick Cant:
Simplicity alone can grace,
The Manners of the rural Race.

Perhaps Swift avails himself of an ironic intimation in that closing periphrase. The “shepherds” become the “rural race” in the course of sixteen syllables saying that they have no right to such a title. Or does Swift accept a certain amount of poetic diction without noticing it? The question evaporates out of the poem itself into the obscure region of Swift's conscious or unconscious intentions.

The final and successful revolt against classical “poetic diction” was more violent—a protest of the second type, primitive, naive, “vegetally” radical,¹² the first of its kind, at least in English literature, and a thing distinctive of a new social and philosophic era. It is worth while remembering that in the statements which we are about to quote, Wordsworth was reacting immediately not so much against Spenser, Milton, and Pope,¹³ the poets who had created English poetic diction, as against his own now anonymous contemporaries who wrote the mélange of dictions which was then poetic staple. The following from the Monthly Magazine, for February, 1797, specializes in periphrastic elegance.

For thee the fields their flowery carpet spread,
And smiling Ocean smooths his wavy bed;
A purer glow the kindling poles display,
Robed in bright effluence of ethereal day,
When through her portals bursts the gaudy spring,
And genial Zephyr waves his balmy wing.
First the gay songsters of the feather'd train
Feel thy keen arrows thrill in every vein.

From the same issue of the Monthly comes this example of the ameliorated pensiveness which had descended in the tradition of Milton's minor poems:

Oh, far removed from my retreat
Be Av'rice and Ambition's feet!
Give me, unconscious of their power,
To taste the peaceful, social hour.
Give me, beneath the branching vine,
The woodbine sweet, or eglantine,
When evening sheds its balmy dews,
To court the chaste, inspiring muse.(14)

Beside these let us set down some short examples of the verse which Wordsworth ventured to print in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and which he defended in his Advertisement and in his Preface to later editions.¹⁵

“How many are you then,” said I,
“If they two are in Heaven?”
The little Maiden did reply,
“O Master! we are seven.”
Few months of life has he in store
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
His poor old ancles swell.
My gentle reader, I perceive
How patiently you've waited,
And I'm afraid that you expect
Some tale will be related.
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
And Susan's growing worse and worse,
And Betty's in a sad quandary
And then there's nobody to say
If she must go, or she must stay:
—She's in a sad quandary

In his Advertisement of 1798 Wordsworth called these poems experimental, and he said they were “written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” He feared his readers would think he had been “too low” and “too familiar,” but he contrasted with his own style “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers.”¹⁶ In his Preface some of the statements are even more downright. He is proud of having uttered “little of what is usually called poetic diction.” His purpose has been “to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men.”¹⁷ He asserts “that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.”¹⁸ His objection to poetic diction is that it is not true to nature—either to external nature or to human nature in its responses to the external. “I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject; consequently, I hope that there is in these poems little falsehood of description, and that my ideas are expressed in language fitted to their respective importance.” He seems to believe too that even honest expressions can become bad poetry just by being repeated. “I have … abstained from the use of many expressions, in themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly repeated by bad poets, 'till such feelings of disgust are connected with them, as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to overpower.” On the genetic side the Preface contains a strong statement of the reasons why the language of “low¹⁹ and rustic” persons is likely to be poetic:

… because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets.

Yet this Preface contains a few statements which look like attempts to qualify Wordsworth's main view concerning the “very language of men,” the language of “low and rustic” persons. For he speaks also about “a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,” about “a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.”²⁰ He wishes to make ordinary situations “interesting” by tracing in them the laws of human nature “as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” “All good poetry,” as every reader of the Preface will remember, “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”²¹

IV

The simplism and primitivism of Wordsworth's poems, and even more of his theoretical views, provoked a considerable volume of immediate protest from his reading public. But the critic who spoke with the shrewdest authority was Coleridge, after a lapse of seventeen years, in his reminiscential Biographia Literaria. Coleridge's argument about poetic diction may be summarized under three main heads.

(1) He said that if Wordsworth, in arguing that the language of “metrical composition” is essentially the same as that of prose, meant only that poetry and prose have the same vocabulary, or dictionary, on which to draw, he was uttering a truism. Coleridge concluded that Wordsworth really meant that the poetic manner of combining words was no different from that of prose. And this, he retorted, was patently false.²² (It is perhaps worth observing that Wordsworth may not in fact have made it quite clear whether he excluded either of the meanings defined by Coleridge—and that it is not necessary, either for justice to Wordsworth, or for the purposes of literary history, to suppose that he had brought himself to the point of facing a sharp distinction.)

(2) Coleridge argued that if a given image or figure (for instance, the “image” of Phoebus as the sun) is used badly by a given poet (for instance, Gray in a sonnet criticized by Wordsworth), the reason for the badness is not that the figure is a repetition of what other poets have done, but that it is in some way a violation of “grammar, logic, psychology,” “good sense,” or “taste”—the “rules of the IMAGINATION.”²³

… it is a bad line, not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because it conveys incongruous images, because it confounds the cause and effect, the real thing with the personified representative of the thing; in short, because it differs with the language of GOOD SENSE! That the “Phoebus” is hackneyed and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote.

—II, 58

Another poet might be found, for instance Spenser, who had used the Phoebus image well.²⁴

(3) Coleridge argued that education, and not the lack of it, tends to make a poet. Uneducated men are disorderly in their writing; they lack “surview.” If the peasantry of Wordsworth's Westmoreland and Cumberland spoke a pure and vigorous language, this came not from uninstructed communion with nature, but from a spirit of independence and from a solid religious education and acquaintance with the Bible and hymnbook.

One kind of speech (socially defined) could not be more real than another.²⁵ But in a given instance it might be either more or less poetic. In his appreciation of Wordsworth's own poetic performance, Coleridge noted that Wordsworth suffered the difficulties of a ventriloquist in his undue liking for the dramatic form. Either a rustic speaker was invested with a Wordsworthian authority of utterance, or an opposite fault appeared, matter-of-factness, circumstantiality, and a downright prosaism.²⁶ “I've measured it from side to side; 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.” It is not possible for a poet, urged Coleridge, especially not for a lyric poet, “to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity.”²⁷

V

The episode of the Lyrical Ballads was of course far from settling the business of poetic diction in English. Before many years had passed, a reviewer of Wordsworth's poems would raise his voice to accuse even Wordsworth of having fostered his own kind of poetic diction, more dangerous than the old, because more “covert and surreptitious,” more “insidious.” A new set of “stock words” seemed to this reviewer to be sprinkled through the “fugitive” poetry of the day “with a sort of feeling senselessness”—words, for instance, like wild, bright, dark, lonely, light, dream. The principle of their use was sentimental association lending color to a “pretext of conveying sense”—“in a manner which Mr. Wordsworth's prefaces will be found to explain.”²⁸

A recent historian of English poetic language has noted the progressive “deliquescence” of diction in English poetry (the development of a certain moonlight norm) during the Tennysonian and Pre-Raphaelite era.²⁹ In our own century we have experienced several waves of reaction to that era, the imagism of Pound, the realism of Masefield, the metaphysical inclusiveness of Eliot. Nothing is likely to seem more axiomatic to the student of poetry today than statements to the effect that “The poetry of a people takes its life from the people's speech and in turn gives life to it,”³⁰ that “the language which is good enough for labor and love and marriage, for birth and death, and the friendly breaking of bread, is good enough … for the making of poetry.”³¹

Nevertheless, the debate between Wordsworth and Coleridge was a significant event in English literary history. It is part of the first romantic revolt against poetic diction in English and it is a more or less adequate monument to two questions: one genetic—Among what kinds of people does poetic language originate? The other critical—How is “poetic diction” in the sense of something undesirably artificial to be distinguished from the valid language—the idiom—of poetry?

VI

The primitivism of Wordsworth was something which had numerous relations with his immediate background, though some of these are only vaguely implicit. Vico was a fountainhead of which he was certainly unaware. It is not necessary to inquire how directly he was in touch with Herder and other continental writers on the theme of Volkspoesie, or with theories of the bardic composition of Homer's epics in English writers like Blackwell, Kames, and Blair.³² More concrete phenomena are the archaic forgeries of the 18th century (the Ossianic epics of Macpherson, the Rowleyan balladry of Chatterton), the cult of the “noble savage,” the “child of nature,” and the pathetically exploited worker poets—Stephen Duck the thresher, Henry Jones the Irish bricklayer patronized by Lord Chesterfield, James Woodhouse the shoemaker, Anne Yearsley the milkmaid (Lactilla) who developed airs and fell out with Hannah More.³³ The vogue was recorded in the ridicule of Byron.

When some brisk youth, the tenant of a stall,
Employs his pen less pointed than his awl,
Leaves his snug shop, forsakes his store of shoes,
St. Crispin quits, and cobbles for the muse,
Heavens! how the vulgar stare! how crowds applaud!
How ladies read, and literati laud!
Let poesy go forth, pervade the whole,
Alike the rustic, and mechanic soul!
Ye tuneful cobblers! still your notes prolong,
Compose at once a slipper and a song.(34)

Wordsworth's primitivism was part of a general reaction, setting in well before his own day, against the aristocratic side of neo-classicism. We have seen that Dryden believed the right language of poetry—the very model of correct poetry—to be the language of the king and court. Pope believed the same, at least of the Elizabethan age.³⁵ About George II he had much difficulty.³⁶ Swift³⁷ and Johnson were severe upon the imbecilities of society talk. Johnson spoke of “female phrases,” “fashionable barbarisms.”³⁸ It was possible, perhaps usual, during all this time, for the anti-aristocratic tendency to rest short of sheer primitivism in what Marxist criticism would later call the bourgeois standard. Thus Goethe, giving explicit utterance to an idea that was no doubt often implicitly entertained: “A middle rank is much more favorable to talent [than a noble rank], so we find all great artists and poets in the middle classes.”³⁹

The period from Wordsworth to the present day has been notable for the variety and complexity of its archaizing and primitivistic trends. Some of these, like the peasant standard arrived at by Tolstoy, have had no direct relation to the language. Others, like the theoretical Saxonizing of English essayists and scholars (Macaulay, for instance, and Furnivall), or the practical Saxonizing of the Homeric translator Francis Newman,⁴⁰ are quite obviously in the area of “poetic diction.” We encounter now, in contrast to the 18th-century beginnings, a primitivism rather formidably equipped with archeological and philological apparatus. A later special development has been a certain esoteric removal of the primitive locus. This means admitting the existence of fake primitives or bourgeois poseurs (like Robert Burns or Longfellow) but at the same time asserting the existence of a genuine peasant wisdom, an oral tradition from the foundations of the world. This was once in rapport with aristocratic and learned wisdom (the hut with the castle and the cloister) but has now been split off by the wedge of bourgeois culture and is withering away. Theorizing of this kind has had a Celtic and visionary orientation.⁴¹

So far as any view of poetic origins prevails very explicitly today, it is still likely to be the primitivistic. Our large literature in the departments of dialect, folk speech, argot and slang, is one testimony to a settled primitivistic interest among scholars. And this interest sometimes raises curious problems concerning not only compilation but evaluation. To select one instance from the many: a writer in the magazine American Speech argues that during World War II there were two kinds of soldier slang—a small number of terms really invented by soldiers and truly expressive (shack up, sweat out, latrine rumour, chew ass), and a much larger number of fake terms invented by newspaper writers, USO workers, and entertainers (armoured cow, for canned milk, scandal sheet, for payroll, misery pipe, for bugle, homing device, for furlough, handgrenades, for hamburgers, tire patches, for pancakes). In the same way there are two kinds of jazz slang—the genuine expressions of jazz musicians and fans (Tailgate, solid, jam, riff, gutbucket, barrelhouse), and the spurious inventions of publicity agents, masters of ceremonies, and popular music magazines (God box, for organ, skin-beater, for drummer, syringe, for trombone, silver sucker, for clarinetist, doghouse, for bass fiddle, gitter or git box, for guitar).

In each case the terms especially invented by persons not familiar through experience with the daily life of soldiers or musicians bear the mark of their artificial origins. They seldom serve a denotive purpose, are laborious, and lack the expressive quality of the terms that have been born of the life experience of the participants themselves.

At the same time, however, this writer notes that jazz musicians and fans tend to discard their own vocabulary when it is taken over by commercial users.⁴² In this kind of inquiry, which is inferred from which? The quality of the term from its origin, or the origin from the quality?

VII

The question about the origins of poetic language seems to allude to a language upon which some sort of special poetic virtue has been conferred before it reaches the poet himself. We are forced to conceive poetic language as a kind of pre-poetically potent vocabulary or vigorous mode of expression. At the same time the history of poetic diction strongly suggests that the main inventors of poetic diction have been professional poets themselves—Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope. Who does make up the good new words and phrases—those that add something to our expressive stock and are fitted to survive? Do these occur first in works of creative literature, or in miscellaneous non-literary places?⁴³ Did the primitive bard write the best poetic language? And if he did, was he an unusually primitive, or an unusually advanced, member of his tribe? Is a modern poet an unusually advanced, or an unusually primitive, member of modern society?

If a dramatic clause be invoked—that is, if we observe that the language of any social class is proper when a writer is representing that class—the inquiry may appear to be translated into something quite different. And indeed it is true that the supposed speaker of any poem is always dramatic, and is always to be conceived as some kind of person, and often as a person not learned or poetically skillful. Nevertheless—as we have heard Coleridge remark about the experiments of Wordsworth—a direct imitation of the uncouth speaker does run a special risk of lapsing into realistic disorder and insignificance. This may be much like what a modern critic has called the “fallacy of imitative form,” or like what Dryden called “mechanic humour” in the correctly low-life imitations of Ben Jonson. It is possible also to have correctly tedious imitations of high life. Johnson and Swift were right about this. Anybody who has ever tried to collect brilliant or pungent expressions either at cocktail parties or at diners along truck routes must have been struck by the prevalence of the brassier kind of clichés and the reiterated simplisms of blasphemy.

VIII

In the end the only question of critical significance is the second of the two which we have framed above: How is poetic diction in the sense of something false and undesirable to be distinguished from the valid language of poetry? Yet it may not be easy to isolate this critical question. In addition to the concept of origins as we have just attempted to describe it, there is yet another, an intermediate kind of concept, that of chronological staleness, the hackneyed, which is usually associated with that of poetic diction and tends greatly to obscure the critical discussion of the latter. The theoretical issue of poetic diction seemed to Wordsworth an issue between artifice and nature.⁴⁴ To Coleridge it seemed more like an issue between propriety and impropriety, congruity and incongruity. In effect he applied the classic norm of decorum. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge assigned a relatively slight role to the chronological concept of the “hackneyed.” Yet the notion of the hackneyed, the stereotype, the cliché, today enjoys a strongly established place in habits of critical thinking. It is likely to be among the first appeals of a theorist called upon to explain why poetic diction is undesirable.

The most obvious sense in which the poet is bound to bear the burden of originality is that which relates originality to the social and commercial conditions of success in literature. There is no practical point in repeating the classics, or in repeating their style. Even if some classic had failed to get written on schedule (in its own era) and even if it could be written instead today, the expectancies and demands of publishers and readers preclude the success of the performance. The undergraduate joker who types out a selection of the less well-known sonnets of Shakespeare and submits them over his own name to a New York press does so in full expectation of being rejected.⁴⁵ This massive and immovable fact about markets and readers is one of the grounds which supports a kind of statement that often proceeds with great authority from the successful literary person. Thus T. S. Eliot:

It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already, as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries. The French poets in question have made “discoveries” in verse of which we cannot afford to be ignorant, discoveries which are not merely a concern for French syntax. To remain with Wordsworth is equivalent to ignoring the whole of science subsequent to Erasmus Darwin.⁴⁶

And Gertrude Stein:

The whole business of writing is the question of living in that contemporariness. Each generation has to live in that … what I am trying to make you understand is that every contemporary writer has to find out what is the inner time-sense of his contemporaries. The writer, or painter, or what-not, feels this thing more vibrantly, and he has a passionate need of putting it down; and that is what creativeness does.⁴⁷

But the critical problem of poetic diction and the cliché requires a somewhat more precise handling than that. One of the minor comic figures of our time is the “Cliché Expert,” who in an early appearance was made to “take the stand” and testified along these lines.

Q—Mr. Arbuthnot, you are an expert in the use of the cliché, are you not?

A—Yes sir, I am a certified public cliché expert.

Q—Would you answer a few questions on the use of the cliché in ordinary speech and writing?

A—I should be only too glad to.

Q—Thank you. Now just for the record—you live in New York?

A—I like to visit New York but I wouldn't live there if you gave me the place.

Q—Then where do you live?

A—Any old place where I hang my hat is home sweet home to me.

Q—What is your age?

A—I am fat, fair, and forty.

Q—And your occupation?

A—Well, after burning the midnight oil at an institution of higher learning, I was for a time a tiller of the soil. Then I went down to the sea in ships. I have been a guardian of the law, a poet at heart, a prominent clubman and a man about town, an eminent—⁴⁸

Here is an ironic frame of reference which makes a series of sorry expressions amusing. But what makes each of the expressions in itself so sorry? Not merely the fact that it is a cold potato, a stereotype (any word in the dictionary enjoys the same status), but the further fact that the expression has a certain special character, even if tame and drab. It attempts to stand up and make a little joke, and the joke is out of place. When the cliché expert took the stand, the context was all against him. There could hardly be any chance for his embroideries, even for the plainest of them. “Fat, fair, and forty” is not an answer for the witness stand.

“In the true notion of the cliché,” says a French critic, “incoherence has its place by the side of triteness.”⁴⁹ The logic of the situation would suggest that even ingenuity and originality are no sure proofs against the cliché. The highly ingenious periphrases often employed at certain levels of journalism have a cold ring, like echoes, even though we cannot say of what. A popular biography of a famous actor, for instance, yields a reviewer the following grounds of patronizing complaint.

For Mr. Fowler, Broadway is inevitably “this street of fickle luster,” a distiller a “maker of spirituous delicacies,” and Shakespeare “Stratford's first gentleman;” cigarette-smoking is “bronchial debauchery,” hair on the chest “torsorial upholstery,” and the men's washroom “ammoniac grottos” equipped with “cracked and homely porcelains.” When he wants to convey the idea that some white mice were multiplying rapidly, he says that the “snowy rodents were fruitful;” and when Barrymore sets out to play Hamlet, or take on “the Danish assignment,” Mr. Fowler says that he “announced … his decision to draw on the black tights of the classic Scandinavian.”⁵⁰

Some of the expressions quoted here are no doubt clichés in the ordinary chronological sense. Others, however, seem unusual. The real character of their offensiveness (or presumable offensiveness) does not lie in their newness or oldness, but in the difficulty one has in conceiving an excuse for them. There is enough information in the expressions themselves and in their translations by the reviewer to suggest a certain inevitable silliness. They may be saved only on the principle of dramatization—and perhaps even then only at some expense to their author. “The fuzzy raffish style of this book,” says the reviewer, “has its special appropriateness to the subject: it is a literary equivalent for the atmosphere in which the events take place. What we get here is the folklore of the Barrymores.”

Bad poetic diction includes a wide range of non-meanings—from the fuzziness or lack of focus that may characterize the whole work of a minor and derivative poet to such grossly misapplied cliché quotations as those noticed by H. W. Fowler in his Modern English Usage.⁵¹ A person who actually remembers what goes on in the first act of Hamlet will not be guilty of a jocular statement that the Ten Commandments are rules which by and large have been “more honored in the breach than in the observance.”

IX

One might experiment with the conception that all language is an arsenal of clichés, some expressions, like man and tree, being only more ordinary and more solidly established than some others,⁵² like umbrageous, prelusive, fleecy kind, and finny tribe. The usual rule of thumb is that a poet should avoid clichés. But a higher rule is that he should be a master of clichés—at all levels. The mastery of the cliché may be illustrated sharply, if simply, in a kind of twisted echo phrase which has been called the “cliché extended.”

At the drop of a brass hat.
To gild the lily with radiator paint.(53)
A penny saved is a penny to squander.
A man is known by the company that he organizes.

Or the autological expression, which itself sums up the principle:

Old saws fitted with new teeth.(54)

Such echoes themselves, of course, are not proof against the cliché use. The final worth always depends on a larger context. “Put a beetle in alcohol, and you have a scarab; put a Mississippian in alcohol, and you have a gentleman.” This piece of local-color wit has a kind of shoddy value which is greatly enhanced in Faulkner's Sanctuary through the fact that it echoes the utterance of Gowan Stevens, the collegiate slicker and lady-killer.⁵⁵

Nowadays one may identify a genre of lightly sophisticated magazine poems whose main logic is the slight tilt which they give to a pattern of cliché vocabulary, or the dainty jangle of cross-purposes which they create between intersecting patterns.

Every soldier is his own architect, a specialist
In the small home constructed reasonably
Along pretty traditional lines, complete with
Smiling wife at ease on screened verandah.(56)

And on the other hand:

For nineteen years I lived a carefree life
And pain and toil and grief I never knew.
Although the world rushed madly on to strife,
My thoughts of national welfare were but few.(57)

It is not necessary to quote more of either poem to establish the contrast: the simple, unaltered reproduction of clichés by the schoolboy veteran about to tell his experiences on being inducted into the army; and the adroitly proffered series of not-quite clichés from the areas of business and advertising in a competent report from the front on the soldier's day dreams. The first poem is an exercise in a limited kind of whimsy—but within its limits, and in contrast to the second, it shows the difference between dead and live language.

Language gains depth and resonance only by being used, and hence some of the most complete and poetically significant uses of words are just those that occur within a poetic tradition. Beside Milton's

No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe

we put Pope's

Of darkness visible so much be lent,
As half to show, half veil, the deep intent.

Gray was glad to call attention to the origin of

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day

in Dante's

… squilla di lontano,
Che paia 'l giorno pianger, che si muore.

A recent examination of mid-18th-century English poetry has defined the “major vocabulary” of that poetry as a complex of quite simple words relating to the age's dominant interest in landscape symbols of optimistic divinity. This vocabulary yields the following synthetically typical line:

Rise, fair day, before the eyes and soul of man.(58)

The poetry of Wordsworth, coming as an artistic climax and renewal, rather than rejection, of this tradition, is in a sense a poetry that turns very simply to nature and the human soul—yet, inescapably, it does this through words, and not entirely through the simple range of words represented in the line just quoted. Wordsworth's poetry is a sound realization and a deepening of certain nature symbols already available to his age in more or less cliché simplifications. It is a dramatization of those symbols by bringing them into contact with select terms from both higher and lower ranges,⁵⁹ from the metaphysical and Johnsonian Latinate range and from the range of low, country words.

                                                            Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees.
                                                            And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

A more directly literary—a more artificial—form of such dramatization was no less a part of the romantic movement in English literature. Thus William Blake, in his juvenile Poetical Sketches.

My silks and fine array,
          My smiles and languish'd air,
By love are driv'n away. …
I'll pore upon the stream,
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.
Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove,
          Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wandring in many a coral grove,
          Fair Nine, forsaking poetry!

In these wryly graceful adaptations of an earlier idiom that had come down through the 18th century in Percy's Reliques and other collections, Blake gives an advanced demonstration of what it means to be a cliché expert.

Notes

1. Cf. F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language (Oxford, 1934).

2. Cf. Ernest De Selincourt, ed. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 1932), Introduction, pp. lxi-lxii; F. M. Padelford, “Aspects of Spenser's Vocabulary,” PQ, XX (July, 1941), 279-83; E. E. Stoll, Poets and Playwrights (Minneapolis, 1930), p. 193.

3. George Gordon, Shakespeare's English, S. P. E. Tract No. 39 (Oxford, 1928), p. 274; John Arthos, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Ann Arbor, 1949), Appendix C.

4. Cf. Geoffrey Tillotson, Essays in Criticism and Research (Cambridge, 1942), p. 84, on “Physico-theological nomenclature”; John Arthos, The Language of Natural Description, Chapters IV and V. Other correlatives of 18th-century poetic diction may perhaps be named. The closure and symmetry of couplet verse, for instance, may often have demanded the trochaic or dactyllic adjective. Cf. Thomas Quayle, Poetic Diction (London, 1924), Chapter II, p. 29, quoting Shenstone's Essays. Personification, as found in the poetry of Johnson, Collins, or Gray, is a kind of abstracting which may be viewed as a special type of poetic diction. Cf. Bertrand H. Bronson, “Personification Reconsidered,” ELH, XIV (September, 1947), 163-177; Earl R. Wasserman, “The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification,” PMLA, LXV (June, 1950), 435-63.

5. See ante Chapter 6, p. 103; Chapter 8, p. 146.

6. Postscript to Pope's translation of the Odyssey. Cf. James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (Oxford, 1948), p. 85.

7. To Richard West, April 4, 1742, Letters, ed. Leonard Whibley, I, 98. Cf. Lord Chesterfield's recommendation of “poetic diction” to his son seven years old (Letters, October 26, 1739).

8. Thomas Quayle, Poetic Diction, p. 7; F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language, p. 71.

9. Life of Dryden, Lives (ed. G. B. Hill), I, 420.

10. Timber No. 118.

11. The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith (London: Globe Edition, 1919), p. 483. “These misguided innovators have not been content with restoring antiquated words and phrases, but have indulged themselves in the most licentious transpositions and the harshest constructions, vainly imagining that the more their writings are unlike prose, the more they resemble poetry.”

    And see Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part II, Canto I, ll. 591-632.

12. Kenneth Burke, “The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke,” Sewanee Review, LVIII (Winter, 1950), 76, argues that all movements toward a new style are movements toward the “infantile,” a way of re-expressing the basic things.

13. “To this day I believe I could repeat, with a little previous rummaging of my memory, several thousand lines of Pope” (Letters of the Wordsworth Family, ed. W. Knight, Boston, 1907, III, 122). The statement is part of a comment made by Wordsworth, in 1836 or later, on Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age and recorded in the manuscript Memoirs of Barron Field.

14. Both examples are quoted in Marjorie L. Barstow, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction (New Haven, 1917), pp. 62-3.

15. The texts of 1800, 1802, 1805 may be conveniently consulted in Wordsworth, Representative Poems, ed. Arthur Beatty (New York, 1937), pp. 676-704.

16. Coleridge, Biographia, Chapter I, speaks of the “glare and glitter of a perpetual yet broken and heterogeneous imagery … an amphibious something.”

17. Cf. his later note to Simon Lee the Old Huntsman: “The expression when the hounds were out, ‘I dearly love their voice,’ was word for word from his own lips.”

18. The phrasing is that of 1802, a slight alteration from that of 1800.

19. “Low” becomes “humble” in 1832.

20. 1802.

21. The italics in these quotations are ours. In the same year, 1800, Wordsworth's letter to the critic John Wilson develops his theory as follows: “Please whom? or what? I answer, human nature as it has been and ever will be. But, where are we to find the best measure of this? I answer, from within; by stripping our own hearts naked, and by looking out of ourselves towards men who lead the simplest lives, and most according to nature; men who have never known false refinements.” But he says also: “It is not enough for me as a Poet, to delineate merely such feelings as all men do sympathize with; but it is also highly desirable to add to these others, such as all men may sympathize with, and such as there is reason to believe they would be better and more moral beings if they did sympathize with.” Wordsworth's argument is aimed against the distaste felt by Wilson and his friends for The Idiot Boy.

22. Cf. Thomas M. Raysor, “Coleridge's Criticism of Wordsworth,” PMLA, LIV (June, 1939), 496-510.

23. Chapter XVIII, (Biographia, ed. J. Shawcross, II, 64-5).

24. Coleridge's master at Christ's Hospital, the Reverend James Bowyer, had been in the habit of saying that “in the truly great poets … there was a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word” (Chapter I; I, 4).

25. Chapter XVII (II, 39).

26. Chapter XXII (II, 101, 109).

27. Chapter XVII (II, 36). Cf. Letter to Southey, July 29, 1802 (Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, I, 386): “Here and there a daring humbleness of language and versification, and a strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity. …”

28. [Sir Henry Taylor], “Wordsworth's Poetical Works,” Quarterly Review, LII (1834) 318-19. Cf. Theodore Spencer, “Antaeus, or Poetic Language and the Actual World,” ELH, X (September, 1943), 182-3. Taylor means that Wordsworth's defense of his own diction offers the rationale of a new poetic diction. A close parallel appears between Taylor's argument and Wordsworth's own indictment of earlier poetic diction. See especially the Appendix to the Lyrical Ballads. 1802.

29. F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language (Oxford, 1934) pp. 108-15.

30. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: 1933), p. 5.

31. Harriet Monroe, quoted in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices (New York, 1931), p. 113.

32. Cf. Wellek, Rise, p. 87; and Wellek's review of Vico's Autobiography, PQ, XXIV (1945), 166-8. Wordsworth's acquaintance with the Abbé Delille and other French georgic poets of the 18th century, shown in his early poems An Evening's Walk and Descriptive Sketches, is discussed by Arthur Beatty in his Wordsworth, Representative Poems (New York, 1937), pp. 31-3, 673.

33. C. B. Tinker, Nature's Simple Plan (Princeton, 1922), pp. 92-103. One difference between Wordsworth and his forerunners of the 18th century was that with the latter the preference for nature did not reach the crisis of diction. That was what Wordsworth had against them. The supposedly primitive or natural poets of the 18th century were not distinguished for a Wordsworthian simplicity of language. They used all the ornaments. The point was precisely that they were able to do this. That apparently was thought to reveal something about origins, about natural inspiration.

34. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, ll. 765 ff.

35. See his Preface to Shakespeare.

36. See his Epistle to Augustus.

37. See his Tatler No. 230.

38. Idler No. 77.

39. Conversations, February 24, 1825. Cf. Wordsworth's phrase “language of conversation in the middle or lower classes of society.”

40. Cf. post Chapter 20, p. 443.

41. See W. B. Yeats, “What is Popular Poetry?” in Ideas of Good and Evil (London, 1903), pp. 1-15. The classic philological discussion is that concerning the origin of the medieval vernacular lyric, Troubadour and Minnesang poetry. Did its origins lie in courtly scholarship or in folk minstrelsy? See Leo Spitzer, “The Mozarabic Lyric and Theodor Frings' Theories,” Comparative Literature, IV (Winter, 1952), 1-4, 17-22. “Where within primitive lyricism should we then place the narrative-lyrical love songs of women inferred from the jarchas (= refrains)? Obviously in that pre-Christian framework of collective, improvised dancing songs of women in springtime which G. Paris, followed therein by Frings, recognized to be at the base of all lyrics in the Romance and Germanic vernaculars.” “We are brought ultimately to visualize a primitive world of women dancing and chanting stanzas of love provided for them by the poets (a Glückslaut or Klage “im Munde des Mädchens, aber von einem Mann, dem Dichter, hineingelegt”), who thus achieve a vicarious pleasure. … Such a collaboration of the two sexes is no creatio ex nihilo. …”

42. Morroe Berger, “Some Excesses of Slang Compilers,” American Speech, XXI (October, 1946), 196-8.

43. Cf. Max J. Herzberg, “Who Makes Up the New Words?” Word Study, XXIV (October, 1948), 1-9. The modern professionals quoted by Mr. Herzberg make very modest claims as linguistic innovators. As any new expression which becomes a part of the language has to appear in print in order to be recorded, it seems at least likely that a professional phase occurs early in the life of each neologism. But do professional journalists make up their own new words or overhear them in oral discourse?

44. Cf. Meyer Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), p. 120.

45. Cf. David Daiches, A Study of Literature (Ithaca, 1948), pp. 127-8.

46. 1918. Quoted by N. H. Pearson and W. R. Benét, The Oxford Anthology of American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1939), p. 1636.

47. Gertrude Stein, “How Writing is Written,” a talk before the students at Choate School in 1935 (cf. The Choate Literary Magazine, XXI, ii, 5-14), in N. H. Pearson and W. R. Benét, The Oxford Anthology of American Literature, pp. 1446-51.

48. Frank Sullivan, “The Cliché Expert Takes the Stand,” The New Yorker, August 31, 1935, pp. 15-16.

49. Remy de Gourmont, “Of Style or Writing” (from his Decadence, trans. W. A. Bradley, New York, 1921), in Essays in Modern Literary Criticism, ed. Ray B. West, Jr. (New York, 1952), p. 62. Cf. Gourmont, Esthétique de la langue française (Paris, 1905), pp. 301-38, “Le Cliché.”

50. Edmund Wilson, review of Gene Fowler, Good Night, Sweet Prince, in The New Yorker, XIX (January 22, 1944), 58; also in Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950).

51. S.v. “quotation.” Cf. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Clichés (New York, 1940), Introduction.

52. There is such a thing as failure to achieve the established clichés of a language. One may have a sense of something like this in reading one of the classics turned into “Basic.”

53. George Arms, “Clichés, Extended and Otherwise,” SRL, XXIX (November 30, 1946), 9.

54. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, s.v. “saw,” in Collected Works (New York, 1911), VII, 310-11.

55. Sanctuary (New York, 1931), p. 29.

56. W. W. Gibson, “The Architects,” The New Yorker, XX (October 1, 1944), 28. Permission the author; © 1944 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

57. Freshman poem.

58. Josephine Miles, The Primary Language of Poetry in the 1740's and 1840's (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 174, 222.

59. In his Prelude; or Growth of a Poet's Mind (VI, 109-12) Wordsworth, speaking, not with complete fairness, of his own early compositions, alludes to a weakness of trading in “classic niceties,”

    The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
    From languages that want the living voice
    To carry meaning to the natural heart.

Abbreviations

ajp The American Journal of Philology

elh ELH: A Journal of English Literary History

jegp The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

jhi Journal of the History of Ideas

mln Modern Language Notes

mlq Modern Language Quarterly

mlr The Modern Language Review

mp Modern Philology

pq Philological Quarterly

sp Studies in Philology

pmla Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

res The Review of English Studies

tls The Times Literary Supplement