THE IMPORTANCE OF POETIC DICTION

 

C.V.G. Krishnamurthy

 

Coleridge made a statement that “Whatever lives in Poetry cannot be translated into other words of the same language without diminution of their significance”.  This is a major test of the appropriate diction employed by poets.

 

Poetry is much more compressed and intense than prose, and so demands a highly imaginative use of language if the feelings aroused in the reader are to be the same which excited the poet as he wrote.  Great poetry arouses in the reader an overwhelming sense that the words chosen are the “right” ones.  The very fact of writing poetry imposes on the poet an obligation to find a compressed and tense mode of speech, which appeals shortly and vividly to the reader’s emotions.  This is especially true in case of lyric poetry.

 

This consciousness of the right type of diction is evident by the revisions certain poets make in their works.  For instance, Keats in the description of the fallen Saturn in “Hyperion” originally wrote, “His old right hand lay nerveless on the ground”.  Later he revised it, as “His old right arm lay nerveless———.”

 

From time to time, controversy has raged as to whether there are words, which are too undignified to be used in poetry.  Movements of revolt have been started against the poetry of the preceding age, which has been claimed, stilted and artificial, and altogether remote from “deeds and language such as men do use”.

 

Thomas Gray appears as the supporter of a special poetic diction, different from the ordinary language of his time .Gray’s trick of using words in a Latin sense is an exaggeration of Milton’s habit.  Gray’s poems provide in a sense the starting point for the Wordsworthian Revolution against Pseudo-poetic diction.

 

Wordsworth’s view was that poetic diction scarcely differed from that of Prose.  His Preface to Lyrical Ballads described the chosen diction “a selection of language really used by men.” According to Wordsworth the words in a poem derive their power from their associations, and the language is like a long inhabited historic site with the successive deposits of all cultural levels embedded in it.

 

There have been constant revolts against the poets of the preceding age.  The Elizabethans were followed by the Metaphysical poets; these gave place to the Augustans; they in their in turn were followed by the Romantics.  The Victorians, Georgians and the Modern poets succeeded them.  There should not be any temptation to scorn either the upholders of tradition or the rebels.  There are certain determining factors of Poetic- Diction:-

1.  The Purpose of the poet

2.  The language condition of the Period and

3.  The sensibility of the Poet.

 

If the poet intends to write for the intellectual elite of the society, the diction will be of the type that caters to their mental calibre but if he is writing for the common masses, the diction will not be a high-brow variety.

 

Secondly, the language condition of the Period determines the Poetic Diction.  But, according to Gray, “the language of the age is never the language of poetry”.  Language really comes out of the sensibility of the poet.  A poet uses a diction, which is appropriate for his vision, ideas, and experience.

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins felt that “the poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.  For the purpose of poetry, the contemporary speech must be heightened and even transformed out of all recognition”.  He used the new “Sprung Rhythm” as in his “Starlight Night”.

 

Modern Poets are faced with the problem of communication because of the collapse of symbols.  The modern poets suffer from schizophrenia (a mental disease marked by disconnection between thoughts, feelings, and actions) so they need a new diction to express the “schism in the Soul”.  They invent new images and new symbols.  For W.B.Yeats “a rose stands for Celtic island, a tower for a metaphysical concept”.

         

 T. S. Eliot in “TheHollow Men” expresses

   

    “Our dried voices, when

    We whisper together

    Are quiet and meaningless

    As wind in dry grass

    Or rats’ feet over broken glass

   In our dry cellar.”                                

 

The Poetic Diction here is in tune with the idea the poet wants to convey.  Each word sinks like a hump of lead into the heart and the idea the poet wants to convey and the entire rhythm reinforces with irresistible force the impression of a cheerless monotony and a disintegrating world.

 

In Modern Period, Diction is studied from the angle of the influence of psychology-“Freudism”.  Dylan Thomas talks about “nails with snails” which indicates a sex symbol.

 

Thirdly, a number of examples can be cited for the varied sensibilities of the Poets by using the suitable Poetic Diction.  John Keats in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

 

“O for a beaker full of the warm South,

 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim”

 

Makes the readers imagine and feel the complete process of the winking of the bubbles of wine in the beaker.

 

When Shelley laments, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!” we begin to search our own wounds.

 

To sum up, Poetic Diction does not simply mean the artistic expression of rhythmical language. Emotion accompanied by imagination or fancy of the Great Poet finds a suitable vent in appropriate Poetic Diction.

 

Shelley’s Poetry of Nature lacks the intimate familiarity with Earth’s common things, which we find in Wordsworth and Keats.  While Nature reveals her beauty to Wordsworth even in the tiniest flower, Shelley’s theme soars higher to either, “light, cloud, atmosphere, or if he descends to Earth, rock, chasm, cave.  His poem, ‘to a Skylark’ loses the bind in the air, and only realizes a voice and ‘unbraided joy’.

 

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