A Dictionary of Cont..

poetic diction 376
sage. such as his statement that the air is bad in
cities and would be fatal were it not, fortunately,
disinfected by the sulphur in coal smoke. Even
so, however, it is unhealthy, and he urges his
readers to Iive in the country:
Fly the rank city, shun its turbid air:
Breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke
And volatile corruption . . .
. . . and (tho’ the lungs abhor
To drink the dun fuliginous abyss)
Did not the acid vigor of the mine,
Roll’d from so many thundring chimneys,
tame
The putrid salts that overswarm the sky;
This caustic venom would perhaps corrode
Those tender cells that draw the vital air,
In vain with all their unctuous rills bedew’d;
Or by the drunken venous tubes, that yawn
In countless pores o’er all the pervious skin.
Imbib’d, would poison the balsamic blood,
And rouse the heart to every fever’s rage.
While yet you breathe, away! the rural wilds
Invite.
Though Wordsworth’s own verse, in general,
illustrated his protest, he did not succeed in persuading
most of the major nineteenth century
poets who followed him to use the common
language of common nineteenth century men.
Coleridge, Rossetti and Morris drew heavily on
the language of medieval ballads. Keats and
Tennyson contrived a diction indebted to Spenser,
Shakespeare and Milton. Landor, Arnold
and Swinburne drew a great deal from the
vocabulary of Greek tragedy.
The Wordsworthian revolution was not really
carried out until the twentieth century, when the
Americans, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, made
it clear that any word might be allowable in
poetry if it were appropriate to the genre, tone
and aim of a poem. One is surprised no longer
to find in poetry the “language of men.” Modern
poets have gone beyond Wordsworth-who felt
that such language should first be “purified”to
use slang, profanity and obscenity and even
foreign words in their work. The last seven lines
of The Waste Land, for instance, contain words
in English, Italian, French and Sanskrit and the
meaning of Ezra Pound’s Cantos-if there is a
meaning-is hidden in Chinese ideographs.
Thus while the term poetic diction may be
(and usually is) a fault-finding one, since it
tends to be used of the language of derivative
poets, it need not be so. Poetic diction may describe
the language really used by real poets, a
language drawn from the whole range of our
vocabulary but used more economically, more
suggestively, more musically than is possible for
versifiers and other ordinary men.
poetic license is the liberty taken by a poet in
deviating from rule, conventional form, logic, or
fact, in order to produce a desired effect. This
may involve departure from prose word order
or the selection of diction, rhyme or pronunciation
appropriate to the requirements of a chosen
metrical pattern.
A bad poet may think he is being poetic when
he writes such lines as:
He did adore her eyes divine
Which seemed to say, “Swain, I am thine
Because thou art so masculine.”
Here the license is obvious: the expletive use of
did in “did adore” for the simple past adored;
the inversion of order of adjective and noun in
eyes divine in the interests of rhyme; the use of
an archaic diction in such words as swain, thine,
art: the forced mispronunciation of masculine in
the interest of rhyme.
Because bad poetry may contain a good deal
of this sort of thing, one cannot assume that
good poetry will contain none of it. In the
achievement of the desired effect any poet is
free to depart from the norms imposed by prose.
Thus Frost gains force by an inversion of normal
word order in the opening line of “Mending
Wall”: Something there is that doesn’t love a
wall.
point, as a noun, may be used in about fifty distinct
senses. Some of these are peculiar to either
England or the United States. In relation to
travel, point is used in the United States as place
or station would be in England (Milwaukee,
Mir.neapolis, and points west). In American
schools, especially in the colleges, point often
signifies a single credit, usually corresponding to
an hour’s class work per week for one semester
(He needs several more points before he can
be regarded as an upperclassman). Where an
American says point or pen-point, an Englishman
says nib. Where an American says exclamation
point or exclamation mark, an Englishman
says point of exclamation or mark of exclamation.
The English use point in railroading to
describe a tapering movable rail, as in a switch.
point-blank is a term, now largely outmoded, from
gunnery. A shot was said to be point-blank when
the barrel of the gun was aimed directly at its
object and the ball moved towards the target
without describing any appreciable curve. Pointblank
range is the distance a missile will travel,
from a horizontal barrel, before falling below
the level from which it is fired.
The conditions that permitted point-blank firing
were those that led to the most dreadful
carnage and the term became a trope for blunt
and uncompromising rejection or repulse, brutal
frankness. But point-blank refusal and pointblank
denial are now cliches, their meaning generally
forgotten and their force spent.
point of view. Jeremy Bentham once made a list
of motives, naming each motive in three cc!umns,
according as it was approved by the
speaker, tolerated, or disapproved of. Thus “love
of the social board” appeared in one column and
“gluttony” in its opposite.
This is an interesting exercise for the writer
because he must be aware of the manner in
which our values, prejudices and passions reveal
themselves in our choice of words. He must be
aware, for example, that the woman whom
others regard as “skinny” may regard herself