A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

“The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words

into a song-pattern, so that the mere arrangement of the syllables

produces a kind of dancing joy…. Greek lyric is derived directly

from the religious dance; that is, not merely the pattering of the

feet, but the yearning movement of the whole body, the ultimate

expression of emotion that cannot be pressed into articulate speech,

compact of intense rhythm and intense feeling.”

Nor should it be forgotten that Milton, while praising “a graceful and ornate rhetoric,” declares that poetry, compared with this, is “more simple, sensuous and passionate.” [Footnote: Tract on Education. ] These words “sensuous” and “passionate,” dulled as they have become by repetition, should be interpreted in their full literal sense. While language is unquestionably a social device for the exchange of ideas and feelings, it is also true that poetic diction is a revelation of individual experience, of body-and-mind contacts with reality. Every poet is still an Adam in the Garden, inventing new names as fast as the new wonderful Beasts–so terrible, so delightful!—come marching by.

3. Words as Current Coin

But the poet’s words, stamped and colored as they are by unique individual experience, must also have a general transmission value which renders them current coin. If words were merely representations of private experience, merely our own nicknames for things, they would not pass the walls of the Garden inhabited by each man’s imagination. “Expression” would be possible, but “communication” would be impossible, and indeed there would be no recognizable terms of expression except the “bow-wow” or “pooh-pooh” or “ding-dong” of the individual Adam–-and even these expressive syllables might not be the ones acceptable to Eve!

The truth is that though the impulse to expression is individual, and that in highly developed languages a single man can give his personal stamp to words, making them say what he wishes them to say, as Dante puts it, speech is nevertheless primarily a social function. A word is a social instrument. “It belongs,” says Professor Whitney, [Footnote: W. D. Whitney, Language and the Study of Language, p. 404.] “not to the individual, but to the member of society…. What we may severally choose to say is not language until it be accepted and employed by our fellows. The whole development of speech, though initiated by the acts of individuals, is wrought out by the community.”

… A solitary man would never frame a language. Let a child grow up in utter seclusion, and, however rich and suggestive might be the nature around him, however full and appreciative his sense of that which lay without, and his consciousness of that which went on within him, he would all his life remain a mute.”

What is more, the individual’s mastery of language is due solely to his social effort in employing it. Speech materials are not inherited; they are painfully acquired. It is well known that an English child brought up in China and hearing no word of English will speak Chinese without a trace of his English parentage in form or idiom. [Footnote: See Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, article “Language.”] His own body-and-mind experiences will be communicated in the medium already established by the body-and-mind experiences of the Chinese race. In that medium only can the thoughts of this English-born child have any transmission value. His father and mother spoke a tongue moulded by Chaucer and Shakspere, but to the boy whom we have imagined all that age-long labor of perfecting a social instrument of speech is lost without a trace. As far as language is concerned, he is a Chinaman and nothing else.

Now take the case of a Chinese boy who has come to an American school and college. Just before writing this paragraph I have read the blue-book of such a boy, written in a Harvard examination on Tennyson. It was an exceptionally well-expressed blue-book, in idiomatic English, and it revealed an unusual appreciation of Tennyson’s delicate and sure felicities of speech. The Chinese boy, by dint of an intellectual effort of which most of his American classmates were incapable, had mastered many of the secrets of an alien tongue, and had taken possession of the rich treasures of English poetry. If he had been composing verse himself, instead of writing a college blue-book, it is likely that he would have preferred to use his own mother-tongue, as the more natural medium for the expression of his intimate thoughts and feelings. But that expression, no matter how artistic, would have “communicated” nothing whatever to an American professor ignorant of the Chinese language. It is clear that the power of any person to convey his ideas and emotions to others is conditioned upon the common possession of some medium of exchange.

4. Words an Imperfect Medium

And it is precisely here that we face one of the fundamental difficulties of the poet’s task; a difficulty that affects, indeed, all human intercourse. For words are notoriously an imperfect medium of communication. They “were not invented at first,” says Professor Walter Raleigh in his book on Wordsworth, “and are very imperfectly adapted at best, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all the weaknesses of their origin, and all the maims inflicted by the prejudices and fanaticisms of generations of their employers. They perpetuate the memory or prolong the life of many noble forms of human extravagance, and they are the monuments of many splendid virtues. But with all their abilities and dignities they are seldom well fitted for the quiet and accurate statement of the thing that is…. Beasts fight with horns, and men, when the guns are silent, with words. The changes of meaning in words from good to bad and from bad to good senses, which are quite independent of their root meaning, is proof enough, without detailed illustration, of the incessant nature of the strife. The question is not what a word means, but what it imputes.” [Footnote: Raleigh’s Wordsworth. London, 1903.]

Now if the quiet and accurate statement of things as they are is the ideal language of prose, it is obvious that the characteristic diction of poetry is unquiet, inaccurate, incurably emotional. Herein lie its dangers and its glories. No poet can keep for very long to the “neutral style,” to the cool gray wallpaper words, so to speak; he wants more color–passionate words that will “stick fiery off” against the neutral background of conventional diction. In vain does Horace warn him against “purple patches”; for he knows that the tolerant Horace allowed himself to use purple patches whenever he wished. All employers of language for emotional effect—orators, novelists, essayists, writers of editorials—utilize in certain passages these colored, heightened, figured words. It is as if they ordered their printers to set individual words or whole groups of words in upper-case type.

And yet these “upper-case words” of heightened emotional value are not really isolated from their context. Their values are relative and not absolute. Like the high lights of a picture, their effectiveness depends upon the tone of the composition as a whole. To insert a big or violent word for its own potency is like sewing the purple patch upon a faded garment. The predominant thought and feeling of a passage give the richest individual words their penetrating power, just as the weight of the axe-head sinks the blade into the wood. “Futurist” poets like Marinetti have protested against the bonds of syntax, the necessity of logical subject and predicate, and have experimented with nouns alone. “Words delivered from the fetters of punctuation,” says Marinetti, “will flash against one another, will interlace their various forms of magnetism, and follow the uninterrupted dynamics of force.” [Footnote: There is an interesting discussion of Futurism in Sir Henry Newbolt’s New Study of English Poetry. Dutton, 1919.] But do they? The reader may judge for himself in reading Marinetti’s poem on the siege of a Turkish fort:

“Towers guns virility flights erection telemetre exstacy toumbtoumb 3

seconds toumbtoumb waves smiles laughs plaff poaff glouglouglouglou

hide-and-seek crystals virgins flesh jewels pearls iodine salts

bromide skirts gas liqueurs bubbles 3 seconds toumbtoumb officer

whiteness telemetre cross fire megaphone sight-at-thousand-metres

all-men-to-left enough every-man-to-his post incline-7-degrees

splendour jet pierce immensity azure deflowering onslaught alleys

cries labyrinth mattress sobs ploughing desert bed precision

telemetre monoplane cackling theatre applause monoplane equals

balcony rose wheel drum trepan gad-fly rout arabs oxen blood-colour

shambles wounds refuge oasis.”

In these vivid nouns there is certainly some raw material for a poem, just as a heap of bits of colored glass might make material for a rose-window. But both poem and window must be built by somebody: the shining fragments will never fashion themselves into a whole.

5. Predominant Tone-Feeling

If each poem is composed in its own “key,” as we say of music, with its own scale of “values,” as we say of pictures, it is obvious that the separate words tend to take on tones and hues from the predominant tone-feeling of the poem. It is a sort of protective coloration, like Nature’s devices for blending birds and insects into their background; or, to choose a more prosaic illustration, like dipping a lump of sugar into a cup of coffee. The white sugar and the yellowish cream and the black coffee blend into something unlike any of the separate ingredients, yet the presence of each is felt. It is true that some words refuse to be absorbed into the texture of the poem: they remain as it were foreign substances in the stream of imagery, something alien, stubborn, jarring, although expressive enough in themselves. All the pioneers in poetic diction assume this risk of using “unpoetic” words in their desire to employ expressive words. Classic examples are Wordsworth’s homely “tubs” and “porringers,” and Walt Whitman’s catalogues of everyday implements used in various trades. Othello was hissed upon its first appearance on the Paris stage because of that “vulgar” word handkerchief. Thus “fork” and “spoon” have almost purely utilitarian associations and are consequently difficult terms for the service of poetry, but “knife” has a wider range of suggestion. Did not the peaceful Robert Louis Stevenson confess his romantic longing to “knife a man”?

But it is not necessary to multiply illustrations of this law of connotation. The true poetic value of a word lies partly in its history, in its past employments, and partly also in the new vitality which it receives from each brain which fills the word with its own life. It is like an old violin, with its subtle overtones, the result of many vibrations of the past, but yet each new player may coax a new tune from it. When Wordsworth writes of

“The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills,”

he is combining words that are immemorially familiar into a total effect that is peculiarly “Wordsworthian.” Diction is obviously only a part of a greater whole in which ideas and emotions are also merged. A concordance of all the words employed by a poet teaches us much about him, and conversely a knowledge of the poet’s personality and of his governing ideas helps us in the study of his diction. Poets often have favorite words—like Marlowe’s “black,” Shelley’s “light,” Tennyson’s “wind,” Swinburne’s “fire.” Each of these words becomes suffused with the whole personality of the poet who employs it. It not only cannot be taken out of its context in the particular poem in which it appears, but it cannot be adequately felt without some recognition of the particular sensational and emotional experience which prompted its use. Many concordance-hunters thus miss the real game, and fall into the Renaissance error of word-grubbing for its own sake, as if mere words had a value of