Baroque Style Objective Correlative Artistic Intention
Poetic Diction is a
term used to mean language and usage peculiar to poetry. This came into
prominence with William Wordsworth’s the Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads in which he claims to have taken pains to avoid what is
usually called ‘Poetic Diction’ though it succumbed to a lot of controversy.
According to
Wordsworth,
There should be no such
thing as language and usage peculiar to poetry.
He asserts that there
is and should be no essential difference between the language of prose and the
language of metrical composition as poetic style is organic and not perspective.
As he wrote in his Essay on Epitaphs, language is not the dress
of thought but its incarnation. Therefore, every poet’s mode of experience is
peculiar to him; it will find expression in a style appropriate to it. No
general poetic style can be prescribed for all poets to follow.
Wordsworth found that his
principle was violated as his predecessors struck to general poetic diction characterized by known stylistic devices and figures of speech. They used to
write poetry by using embellished language and particular decorum. Other
prominent features were the extensive use of difficult words, allusions,
personifications and avoidance of things considered as low. But this was
natural to them as they wrote naturally, feeling powerfully in a figurative
language. Attacking Neo-Classicism he says that the poets of neo-classical age
derived their poetic diction from the Classical poets like Spenser, Milton etc
that is they imitated it artificially.
According to Grey, the
language of age is never the age of poetry.
Dryden asserted that
the best language is that of Kings and courtiers. However, Wordsworth rejected
the artificial and stagnant poetic diction both in theory and practice. He
denounced the superficial and over-embellished language and aimed to write
poetry using the language of common mankind. He modified this by selection from
common language and not rustic language. His poetic diction is a simple
expression of pure passions by men living close to nature. As the language is
natural therefore, it must be spontaneous and instinctive. Metaphors and
figures of speech were not bad to him; they were bad if they were not organic
to poem and added to it merely as ornaments.
According to Coleridge,
Wordsworth was fully justified in his criticism of artificiality and
unnaturalness of a poetic diction which had become stagnant and hindered rather
than capture the exact curve of a creative writer’s experience. But, he
disagrees with Wordsworth’s view that the language of poetry should be the
language of common men under the influence of natural feelings as Wordsworth
himself grants that the language of common men is to be purified from all
defects.
Coleridge also points out to the contradictions that exist in his
theory. On one hand Wordsworth recommends for the poetic use of language of
general masses and on the other hand insists on principle of selection. Also,
he denies any difference between the language of poetry and that of prose but
dilates on the utility of metre and the way it affects the language in poetry.
Though poetry became
less stilted in its language, its vocabulary remained on the whole distinctive
throughout the Romantic and Victorian periods, and few followed Wordsworth in
his faith that the language of common men is plainer, more emphatic and more
philosophical than the gaudiness and inane phraseology which he condemned. It
was not until the twentieth century and the advent of Modernism in the works of
Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Pound and others that another major attempt to enlarge the
poetic diction and bring it closer to ordinary speech was made.
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