theoryofliteratu00inwell

CHAPTER XIV
Style and Stylistics
Language is quite literally the material of the literary artist.
Every literary work, one could say, is merely a selection from a
given language, just as a work of sculpture has been described as
a block of marble with some pieces chipped off. In his little book
English Poetry and the English Language, F. W. Bateson has
argued that literature is a part of the general history of language
and is completely dependent on it. "My thesis is that the age's
imprint in a poem is not to be traced to the poet but to the lan-
guage. The real history of poetry is, I believe, the history of the
changes in the kind of language in which successive poems have
been written. And it is these changes of language only that are
due to the pressure of social and intellectual tendencies." x Bate-
son makes out a good case for this close dependence of poetical
history on linguistic history. Certainly the evolution of English
poetry parallels at least the loose buoyancy of the Elizabethan
speech, the tamed clarity of the eighteenth century, and the
vague diffuseness of Victorian English. Linguistic theories cer-
tainly play an important part in the history of poetry, e.g.,
Hobbesian rationalism, with its stress on denotation, clarity, and
scientific precision, has influenced English poetry profoundly
though often deviously.
One can argue, with Karl Vossler, that the "literary history
of certain periods would gain by an analysis of the linguistic
milieu at least as much as by the usual analyses of political, social,
and religious tendencies or the country and climate." 2 Espe-
cially in periods and countries where several linguistic conventions
are struggling for domination, the uses, attitudes, and
allegiances of a poet may be important not only for the development
of the linguistic system but for an understanding of his own
art. In Italy, the "language question" can scarcely be ignored by
literary historians. Vossler has put his study of literature to con-
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