Augustan Poetic Diction 9781472553959, 9781472512925

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PREFACE T H I Spaperback book consists of the first four chapters of my Augustan Studies minus the appendix to the fourth. I t has been felt that students in particular might find it useful to have the essays on poetic diction available in handy form, and the fourth essay has been added because it is closely connected with them. As a quartet they may be regarded as a contribution to Augustan poetic theory and practice. The opportunity has been taken to correct a number of misprints and a few additional notes have been added on page 143. The index is a compromise: under the proper names the entries are complete, or almost so; the entries of topics, however, do not attempt to be exhaustive. G. T. Birkbeck College, Universit3, of London g April 1964

ABBREVIATIONS Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell, 6 vols., Oxford, 1934-40 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols., Oxford, '907 Dryden, Essays, selected and ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols., Oxford, 1900 Gray, The Correspondeme, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols., Oxford, 1935 Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols., Oxford, 1905 Keats, Letters, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman, 3rd edn., Oxford, 1947 Pope, The Correspotzdence, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols., Oxford, 1956 Ruskin, The Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 VO~S., 1903-12 Spence, J., Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men, ed. S. W. Singer, 1820 Spingarn, J. E. (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols., Oxford, I 908-9

AUGUSTAN P O E T I C DICTION: I I N T H E greatest poetry of the ages of Dryden and Pope the question of 'poetic diction' scarcely arises: When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat; Yet, fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit; Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay: To-morrow's falser than the former day. .I

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The Dean is dead, (and what is T r ~ r n p s ? ) ~ Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me. . . .3 SLOWRISES WORTH BY POVERTY DEPRESS'D: But here more slow, where all are slaves to gold, Where looks are merchandise and smiles are sold.

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No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose,) The bosom of his Father and his God.= I n these passages there is no use of prescribed words, nothing in the vocabulary that the subject has not directly and of itself suggested to the poet. These poets wrote their best poetry with man as theme. Whatever else they spoke of, it was with him as stated reference. They stood at the human centre, and saw the horizon and the sky in the sort of way that Ptolemy saw the universe. Man was the centre, however wide the circle described by his stretched compass. Wordsworth thought of the poet as a 'man speaking to men'. Clearly this is the implied view of all poets who publish their poems. Much therefore

' Dryden, Aurcng-Gbc, N. i. 33 ff. Swift, 'Verses on the Death of Dr Swift', 1. 228 Pope, Imitations of Horace, 'Epil. to the Satires', ii. 208 f. 'Johnson, London, 11. 177 IT. Gray, 'Elegy', 11. 125 ff. a

AUGUSTAN P O E T I C DICTION: I1 I T I S still true that most readers of eighteenth-century poetry approach it by way of nineteenth-century poetry. They have been brought up to expect poetry to be written in a certain way, its words to be chosen in accordance with certain principles. They know what Wordsworth said about Pope before they read Pope. And this means that when they read Pope and other eighteenth-century poets, they apply the wrong criteria: criteria which are wrong" because irrelevant. These wrong criteria are often applied to the poetic diction of eighteenth-century poetry. In using the terms 'eighteenthcentury' and 'nineteenth-century' I do not intend to imply that they carry any well-defined meanings for the historian or critic of the poetic diction. Blake, who uses almost none of the diction, is an eighteenth-century poet. O n the other hand, poets born later are not necessarily immune from the waning infection. The passionate attack on the diction made by Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom we think of as nineteenth-century poets, is all the more passionate because the eighteenth-century is in their blood and will not be expelled. Byron, of course, glories in the ancestral germs. Keats and, to a smaller extent, Shelley use the diction more than is generally seen, and even Tennyson does not cut himself off from it, though he seems to discover it again for himself rather than to use it from habit. " Browning appears to be the first poet of the nineteenth century who is not indebted to the diction. The generalizations made below will apply in various degrees to the poets of the two centuries and also to poets of the seventeenth-and the sixteenth, since the methods of forming the diction, and even part of the diction itself, are already found in Spenser, in Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas, and in most succeeding poets except, broadly speaking, the metaphysicals.

MORE ABOUT P O E T I C D I C T I O N T H ET E R M 'poetic diction' does not appear in the OED, and it seems that even the term 'diction' was not admitted into any diction-ary until Johnson's in 1755. NO doubt both terms were considered too specialized-they were terms used solely by critics. T o critics the concept of poetic diction had been familiar from the first-in his Art of Poetry Aristotle had discussed the diction of tragedy. As to the English term for it, Dryden preferred one that for us covers the whole of which diction is a part. I n 1685 he almost adopted the new word, actually writing 'diction', but proceeding with a preferred alternative-'or (to speak English) . expression^'.^ And ten years later he fell back more decisively on the familiar seventeenth-century term, speaking of the 'dictio Virgiliana', and translating the noun by 'expression'. Accordingly it was John Dennis who gave us our term: in the preface to his Remarks on a Book entituled, Prince Arthur, an Heroick Poem. With some general critical Observations, and several new Remarks upon Virgil he announces: 'I design'd particularly to have examin'd the difference between a Poetick and a .'3 Unfortunately, as his editor tells us, Prosaick Diction. that design remained unfulfilled. Something of his conclusions, however, may be gathered from his requiring 'expression', when it is that of an epic poem, to be 'pure, clear, easie, strong, noble, poetick, harmonious',* even though some of these desirable qualities can now be properly discerned only by scholars versed in the civilization of the late seventeenth century, and even though the term 'poetick' unashamedly begs the question. I n the Preface to his Iliad in 1715, Pope also used the term, or a form of it, in describing Homer as 'the Father of

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Essavs. i. 266. < , id., ii. 148. 8 Critical Works, ed. E. N. Hooker, Baltimore, 1939-43, i. 47. ibid. 1

T H E MANNER OF P R O C E E D I N G I N C E R T A I N E I G H T E E N T H - A N D EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY POEMS O N EO F the main differences between the way we experience a piece of writing and the way we experience a picture is the order in which we experience their constituent parts. We look at a picture, and see it as a whole straight off; we continue to look at it and spend the minutes in exploring its square inches, relating its particulars a few at a time, testing how much of our suspended indifference or eager pleasure they can be trusted not to betray. The eye fingers its details: however well the painter may have managed his construction in the hope that the spectator will play with his details in a certain order, the spectator goes his own way among them, more or less. The writer, on the other hand, not only arranges his particulars, but controls the order in which we receive them-unless, of course, we defeat his plan by dipping or skipping. Both the painter and the writer give us wholes-the painter gives us the whole twice over, once at first sight, and again as a reward for our having investigated the details. But the whole that we get from a piece of writing on our first and crucial experience of it is built up as word follows word in fixed order. As word follows word. You see at once that I am proposing to slow down the speed at which most of us read literature. For some centuries now, readers have read literature fast. Fast reading is right for literature written carelessly, or designed for fast reading. I t is probable that the slow reader gets no more out of the novels of, say, Defoe, than the fast reader. Mostnovelsshould be read fast, and certain poems also: those of Swinburne and William Morris, for instance. But what can a fast reader get from 'Lycidas', or The Dunciad, or The Vanity of Human Wishes, or the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? He can get something, no doubt, just as a bicyclist, as he free-wheels down a slope, can get a blur

ADDITIONAL NOTES pp. 32 f. It is interesting to find a painter confirming my interpretation of Pope's 'whitening'. I n his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, etc. Edward Lear .' (p. 200). writes: 'Sheep, geese, and turkeys whiten these plains

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p. 32 n 2. I n view of pp. 75 f dissolve should have been added to this list of words from the 'poetic diction' M hich Keats adopts with variation. p. 49. Kingsley may also have meant to include under 'this new poetic diction' words falling into my first category-words such as 'tremblement' (E. B. Browning's 'The Lost Bower' in Poems, I 844). p. 59 n 3. Dr Geoffrey Britton has sent me a passage from Robinson Crusoe showing that in the early eighteenth century ( a ) beard could still be used to denote the hair on the upper lip, and ( 6 ) that that hair could also be called whiskers or 'mustachios' : My beard I had once suffered to grow till it was about a quarter of a yard long; but as I had both scissors and razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short, except what grew on my upper lip, which I had trimmed into a large pair of Mahometan whiskers . . . of these mustachios or whiskers, I will not say they were long enough to hang my hat upon them, but they were of a length and shape monstrous enough, and such as, in England, would have passed for frightful. The O E D shows the Spanish mostacho (in some form or other) already in the sixteenth century being used in England in its modern sense. Whiskers often meant what we mean by moustache until it came to mean the hair on the cheeks. In the Rape of ihe Lock the kings on the playing cards are described as having 'hoary Whiskers and a forky Beard'. p. 61. Further instances of the use of the diction by travellers come in the first 50 pages of Mrs Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (2nd edn., 1832): 'sweet spoil' (sugar canes), 'vegetable wall' (trees), 'silver tribute' (of a mountain torrent). pp. 84 f. The principle that the phrase is important rather than the word throws light on Miss Reynolds' list of phrases from Dryden on p. 71. pp. 87 f. It is interesting to find Hopkins describing Gray's sonnet on the death of West as 'an exquisite piece of art' ( T h e Correspondence [with] Richard Watson Dixon, ed. C . C . Abbott, 1955 edn., p. 87).