routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge
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and Dryden in the seventeenth century and T.S. Eliot in the twentieth
century attempted similar processes of renewal.
At the time of writing, the classical, Latinate style of Milton and his
poetic descendants tended to be regarded as the norm. It was an
appropriately elevated ‘diction’ which conferred dignity on lofty
thoughts and feelings. Such diction was rejected in the Preface as
being too elitist and too remote from the language of ‘a man speaking
to men’. Here are two examples which illustrate the argument. One is
taken from mid-eighteenth-century poetry; the other is taken from a
poem by Wordsworth.
Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
(Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College)
In the sweet shire of Cardigan,
Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,
An old man dwells, a little man,
I’ve heard he once was tall. . . .
Full five and twenty years he lived
A running huntsman merry;
And, though he has but one eye left,
His cheek is like a cherry.
(William Wordsworth, Simon Lee)
Although they are less than fifty years apart, the poems show marked
contrasts in language. Wordsworth believed that the kind of poetry
written by Gray was too affected and ornate with its mainly Latin
vocabulary and its deliberate choices of words and phrases which are
far removed from everyday language use (for example, ‘disporting’:
playing; ‘margent green’: river bank; ‘cleave with pliant arm’: swim)
and which conform to Gray’s own theory that the language of poetry
should have an elevated diction of its own. In Simon Lee, Wordsworth
writes in unaffectedly simple language, although the demands of such
poetic conventions as rhythm and metrics mean that the language can
never be entirely similar to ordinary language.
In poetic practice, however, there are limitations to Wordsworth’s