Meredith’s Poetic Novel: Diana of the Crossways

 

 

     My 1917 Modern Library edition  of Diana of the Crossways includes an introduction by Arthur Symons, the critic who shaped readers’ understanding of Symbolist and Decadent poetry.  He maintains that Meredith “breaks every rule” of novel-writing, that he is in fact “essentially a poet, not a novelist.”  To Symons Meredith has written “the most intellectual” English novels as he aims at “something which is the poetry of pure idea.”  He thus writes prose “as if it were poetry, with an endeavour to pack every phrase with imaginative meaning, every sentence, you realise, will be an epigram.”  For him “life recorded becomes, not a new life, but literature about life.” 

     This tendency is particularly pronounced in Diana of the Crossways as the title character is well-known for her epigrams and witty conversational sallies, many reported in the first chapter “Of Diaries and Diarists.”  In describing her, Meredith comments self-reflexively on his own use of such material. 

 

    Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of roast meats, past with the picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital breath.  They have it rarely, or it eludes the chronicler. To say of the great erratic and forsaken Lady A****, after she had accepted the consolations of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in asterisks “as she was now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God,” sounds to us a roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere.  Sitting at the roast we might have thought differently.  Perry Wilkinson is not happier in citing her reply to his compliment on the reviewers’ unanimous eulogy of her humour and pathos:—the “merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in every work of fiction,” she says, lamenting the writer's compulsion to go on producing them for applause until it is extremest age that knocks their knees.  We are informed by Lady Pennon of 'the most amusing description of the first impressions of a pretty English simpleton in Paris'; and here is an opportunity for ludicrous contrast of the French and English styles of pushing flatteries—'piping to the charmed animal,' as Mrs. Warwick terms it in another place: but Lady Pennon was acquainted with the silly woman of the piece, and found her amusement in the 'wonderful truth' of that representation.

 

     The initial figure of speech compares wit to the scent of dinner on the fire specifically drawing attention to the ephemeral quality of both phenomena.  Meredith then begins with a variation of the modesty topos by declaring that, since such remarks can only be appreciated in lived experience, his project of recording them must fail.  To test this hypothesis, he proceeds to a particular bon mot concerning “the great erratic and forsaken Lady A****.”  The comment, as it turns out, depends for its effect, not on being present in person, but rather on the anecdote’s written form using asterisks.  Yet this, too, though it is worth recording apparently, he denigrates as possessing “wit somewhere and fun nowhere.”  He realizes his effect as he at the same time denies it.  The first three sentences have required the reader first to compare an impression of cleverness with a smell of dinner cooking, then with a breath.  Wine is allusively called “Bacchus,” asterisks are equated with stars, and drunkenness with theophany, surely a hefty burden of figures of speech for a few lines of prose. 

     He promises no more likely survival for the spirit of Diana’s next quoted witticism, that she must act the “merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in every work of fiction.”  Here she highlights the art of her repartee with allusions to circus and commedia dell’arte performance.  She is said to find it “lamentable” that she must produce such “drolleries” until advanced old age, itself figured concretely as the time that “extremest age” makes the knees knock.  Thus, just as she is shown to be extra clever by her belittling her own conversational abilities, Meredith’s persona strengthens his case for her by denying that his repeating of such lines can have the effect they had when originally spoken.  Still, the author seems to be satisfied at the extent to which he has achieved his desired effect of convincing the reader of Diana’s verbal skills when he mentions another of her satirical comments, one recalled by Lady Pennon, and attests to its “wonderful” effect without even recording what she said.  Here the reader is expected to be impressed by precisely nothing. 

     Though the work scarcely shrinks from themes – it contains perhaps the most explicit feminist thinking of any fiction of its era – Meredith’s primary appeal is in poetry: synaesthesia, figures of speech, and fresh language.  Memories are said to be like cooking odors and asterisks like stars while old age is signified by knock knees and Diana resembles a circus clown.  Apart from the book-long associations of Diana Warwick with the divine huntress, this brief passage contains allusions to Dionysos, Ariadne, and Orpheus, and the theatrical figure of Pantalone.  (In the following paragraph Tacitus is quoted in Latin.)  This dense texture, replete with tropes, foregrounds the verbal medium with less emphasis on the semantic content.  

     After all, what the passage says is that is has no possibility of success, that writing cannot possibly reproduce the moment of lived experience, that in fact lived experience is ineffable and the writer can never hope to convey the feeling of narrated incidents.  Given that denial of language’s ability to mirror life, the writer entertains just as Diana did, by linguistic fireworks and puzzles.  Rhetorical devices such as allusions are showy artifices and every metaphor is a little riddle.  Diana of the Crossways is, as Symons says, “a poetic novel,” and its readers will enjoy the pleasures often associated with poetry.

     In fact Meredith was surely not indifferent to tendentious elements in his tale.  He is quite explicit about his analysis of women’s causes and these were very much in the air as women had, in the generation before the novel’s publication, gained rights to divorce, property ownership, and education, including the medical profession.   Furthermore, the book is in part a roman à clef based on a scandal involving the Honorable Mrs. Norton, Lord Melbourne, Sidney Herbert, John Delane, and others.  Yet these elements are, on every page of the novel, secondary to Meredith’s word-play and verbal ingenuity.  If it is impossible for us to understand Diana’s cleverness through retold anecdotes, we have before us Meredith’s wit, and that, of course, is all we need.

On Alexander Pope’s “Art of Sinking”

 with reflections on the abundance of bathos in our own time

 

 

I.

     Alexander Pope’s “Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry” [1] satirizes contemporary poets, in particular for what Pope (in a new application of the word) terms bathos, a mingling of the commonplace and the sublime that violates decorum.  While Pope’s title plays on the treatise On the Sublime attributed to Longinus, the piece is targeted at his poetic rivals, Ambrose Philips and a long list of others identified only by initials.  Pope was an active controversialist on the side of neo-Classicism and Tory rule, though personal rather than ideological motives seem at the base of many of his polemics.  In “Peri Bathous,” for instance, he is less concerned with setting forth literary principles than he is with criticizing others’ poor taste.  While the essay might disappoint the theorist, it is filled with Pope’s incisive wit, and accurately predicts a trajectory of modern poetry which, for better or for worse, has continued to pursue the “Art of Sinking.”

         In what might be called a comic apocalyptic reflex, Pope’s essay calls for an inversion of conventional values of literary judgement.  The fact is that there is little to differentiate the satirist from the objects of his ridicule in theory.  They all participate in the assumptions of neo-Classicism, yet in Pope’s view, his rivals are utterly incompetent.  Apart from ridiculing the absurdity of the “sinking” poetry they produce, Pope attacks hacks who write to order for pay in spite of the fact that he himself actively and successfully pursued a career as a professional writer.  

     Pope and the targets of his satire share their age’s stress on the value of models and in ornamentation through a generous use of rhetorical figures.   Thus, he declares, with the essay’s pervasive irony, that it is a “grievous errour” that “the rules of the ancients were equally necessary to the moderns” (I)  The tropes and figures he examines in some technical detail (X-XI) had been received ideas as the basis for the construction of aesthetic texts from the Rhetorica ad Herennium through Puttenham and into Pope’s day.

     The expressions Pope ridicules are not in form wrong; their absurdity arises through loss of decorum.   Pope’s central model of bathos is a figure in which one element is discordant with the next, the sort of ill-fitting parts that Horace figures at the outset of the “Art of Poetry” as monstrous chimerical creatures, for instance, part horse and part man, or woman and fish.  His rivals, he suggests, are unable to exercise taste enough to make the elements of their images match.  They work the same vein as he, but cannot perform up to his standard. 

     The poor taste of the poets Pope ridicules has, he believes, a material base: they write for money and thus will shape their efforts toward the most widespread popularity rather than the greatest beauty.  Rather than speaking of inspiration or genius, he focuses on the business of poetry, speaking of the “trade” and “manufacture” of literature.  (XIII)  Using the “Golden Rule of Transformation,” one may generate absurdities freely and reduce any object to the ridiculous by the simple technique of examining it through “the wrong end of a Perspective Glass, by which all the Objects of Nature are lessen’d.” (V)  This is in fact only an example of the departure from common sense and the acceptance of truth in nature which Pope decries.  In a way not wholly unlike the “commodity fetishization” Marx and his followers regarded as obscuring economic relations, this false view blocks the creation and appreciation of the sublime for Pope. [2] 

     Britain was moving already toward industrial capitalism during Pope’s time from the feudal agriculture-based economy, so the arbiter of aesthetic decision was becoming ever less the nobility and their toadies and becoming the literate bourgeoisie.  With even greater plausibility than those in the eighteenth century who doubted the judgement of the public in making political decisions, Pope’s persona neatly finesses his replacement of the Horatian formula by arguing that “if the intent of all poetry be to divert and instruct, certainly that kind, which diverts and instructs the greatest number, is to be preferred.”  The effect is to abandon any attempt to impress the cultivated, “men of a nice and foppish gusto, whom after all it is almost impossible to please,” or “to write for posterity of whose taste we cannot make any judgment,” and to make “gain the principal end of our art.” (II)  Though ironically expressed, these views echo Boileau who insists that the poet must write with “immortal Fame” in mind, that abject dedication to  patrons leads to work unbecomingly “fill'd with fulsome flatteries.”  The author must never choose “Gold for the object of a gen'erous Muse,” yet with “the Stars propitious Influence” a poet may yet hope “a sharp-sighted Prince, by early Grants/ Rewards your Merits, and prevents your Wants.” [3] 

     Therefore, one need have no particular training, background, or apprenticeship to be poetic; it is rather within reach of everyman.  In fact, Pope playfully suggests that certain low persons might prove especially gifted.  Since “nothing is more evident than that divers persons, no other way remarkable, have each a strong disposition to the formation of some particular trope or figure,” the production of poetry could be done collectively by these specialists. (XIII)  Thus fishmongers might compose epithets, since “epithets may be found in great plenty at Billingsgate,” anadiplosis may be trusted to “common criers and hawkers, who by redoubling the same words persuade people to buy their oysters, green hastings, or new ballads,” and “the ellipsis, or speech by half-words” entrusted to “ministers and politicians.”

     In what now seems a striking anticipation of both assembly line production and the capitalist creation of imaginative works by committee in film and television designed to appeal to the largest demographics.  In the early days of the Industrial Revolution Pope had in this essay invented the English use of the term bathos as though it were necessary to define a new phenomenon, but, in the centuries since, bathos has flourished to such an extent and readers have, during the last century, proven so fond on “low” imagery that the bathetic has proven dominant.

     In his own view, Pope was nothing but normative.  It is he who imitates nature and they who are “anti-natural.” (V)  To him he is the reasonable man calling attention to the failings of the unreasonable.  He considers himself a member not so much of a partisan group as of the party of the correct.  In terms of his condemnation of writing for money, his own practice had been mixed and transitional like his age.  While constantly seeking highly placed supporters, Pope had no illusions about patronage and in the Dunciad satirizes those who value the most extravagant praise from their poets over the most competent verse.  “He wins this Patron who can tickle best” (II 198)  Pope’s own competence, allowing him to build his villa in Twickenham, was made by the sales of his translations of Homer and then his edition of Shakespeare.  He also cultivated patrons such as Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and Allen Bathurst, Baron and later 1st Earl Bathurst.  Yet the transitional character of the age is clear in the fact the popularity and patronage were by no means mutually exclusive.  Pope and others published sometimes by subscription and one noble title on the list will attract others as well as those on lower rungs of the social ladder.

     The reader may look to Pope for superb craft and brilliant wit.  He excels at formulating “what oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,” but he does not strive after original ideas, nor is he really a man of ideas at all.  He is nonetheless an outstanding poet, and it is his poetic gift that illuminates “The Art of Sinking.”  In it the reader may see art questioning its own ability to survive the coming of the age of crass capitalist philistinism.  

 

 

II.

     Though the modern reader may suspect that Pope was not in the end arguing on behalf of anything more than his own superior practice, he was quite right about the shift in the business of literature.  With the hegemony of monopoly and finance capitalism in the centuries since has come likewise a further “sinking.”  The eighteenth century could scarcely have imagined the depths to which modern artists have sunk during an age in which popularity is virtually uncontested as an index of excellence, and even the educated discuss television shows and rock bands and know nothing further of the arts.  These commodified commercial forms, of course, for the most part assume the predominant values of their society just as all popular genres will tend to do. 

     The hierarchical structure which enables Pope’s complaint of mixing low and high is explicitly opposed by many modern poets.  The tendency is commonplace since Wordsworth was attacked for his

language “which is coarse, inelegant or infantine,” betraying “perverseness and bad taste.”  The influential Lord Jeffrey, with assumptions little changed from Pope’s found in Wordsworth the fault “of connecting his most lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions, with objects and incidents, which the greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting.     All the world laughs at Elegiac stanzas to a sucking-pig — a Hymn on Washing-day — Sonnets to one's grandmother — or Pindarics on gooseberry-pye.” [4]

     Since that rear-guard assault by a traditionalist over two hundred years ago, the parameters of poetry have shifted dramatically and bathos has, proven if not a clear victor, the stronger contender.  Readers will require no evidence on this score as most of the innovative currents since the Romantics have justified the use of the banal, the vulgar, and the colloquial and have often intentionally linked low and high. [5]  A brief survey of such practices might include Whitmanic, Cubist, Imagist, Objectivist, and Socialist Realist poetry which each of which in its own way values the “low.”  Vorticism, Aleatory, and Language poetry privilege discontinuities. [6]  Surely Pope would have thought quite preposterous the ironic modes of aesthetic appreciation that have developed in the last hundred years: the kitsch, the camp, the hip all intentionally appreciate what a traditionalist would find ugly.  Great work has been done even by the extreme practitioners in this mode; one need think only of Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge, but their achievements would have only bewildered a critic of Pope’s sensibilities. 

     The causes of this evolution may be various, but the most significant is surely that named by Pope – the substitution of an undiscriminating public for a smaller but more cultivated audience.  The analysis of audience is turned upon Pope himself by Christopher Caudwell, in his classic of ‘thirties vulgar Marxist literary history.  With the pose of certainty associated with “scientific” socialism, Caudwell asserts that Alexander Pope “perfectly expresses the ideals of the bourgeois class in alliance with a bourgeoisified aristocracy in the epoch of manufacture.”  [7]  Dependent on patrons, poets of his day were obliged “to To him “Pope’s poetry and his ‘reason’” are “a reflection of that stage of the bourgeois illusion where freedom for the bourgeoisie can only be ‘limited.’”  Introducing a surprisingly affective term Caudwell says that in the eighteenth century “the imposition of outward forms on the heart is necessary and accepted.”

    While true, these statements are not far from being simple truisms and thus of little probative value.  Every poet, even the avant-garde and the counter-cultural, must “speak the language of his paymasters.”  And surely freedom is always limited, the living heart cannot be entirely liberated.  Out of tension and contradiction arise history, consciousness, and poetry, charged always with unsatisfied desire.  Perfect satisfaction, total enlightenment is silent. Absence of form is chaos.  Human ideas are defined by the specific forms thought assumes under multiple determinants. 

     A siren in the form of the mirage of a coherent chain of being sang to Pope.  He saw his place beneath a proper king atop a structure that included enlightened patrons.  Aristocrats might demonstrate their nobility by refined taste in this scheme while less sensitive readers gulp down bad verse.  The more common modern illusion collapses the old value distinctions and eliminates the standard of decorum.  Yet the modern idea of the poet justifies itself by a kind of democracy of things, a notion developing from Donne through Wordsworth and Whitman, in which a bedbug may be as grand as a mountain and form is infinitely variable.  We look back on Pope, then, with nostalgia, as one who lived during those when one could imagine a bedrock of established truth beneath his feet.      

 

 

1.  the essay was published under the name Martinus Scriblerus in “The Last Volume” of Motte’s Miscellanies in  Prose and Verse March 8, 1727/8   The authorship is still contested by some scholars, with Arbuthnot and Swift the other candidates, but contemporary opinion favors Pope.  For a discussion of the issue in a complete critical edition see Edna Leake Steeves’ The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1952).

2.  Cf. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).

3.  Art of Poetry, translated by William Soames and revised by John Dryden, Canto IV, lines 100, 138, 143, and 155-159.

4.  Francis Jeffrey, Review of Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes; Edinburgh Review 11 (October 1807) 214-31.

5.  Even trends like the Symbolists and later prophetic and “deep image” practitioners which aspire to sublimity do so often through unassuming or unlikely imagery. 

6.  Charles Bernstein says in “Semblance”: “Textures, vocabularies, discourses, constructivist modes of radically different character are not integrated into a field as part of a predetermined planar architecture; the gaps and jumps compose a space with shifting parameters, types and styles of discourse constantly crisscrossing, interacting, creating new gels."

7.  Illusion and Reality, 86.

Dialectical Rhetoric in Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie

  

Parenthetical citations, sometimes serving to locate more than one quotation, refer to Book and Chapter of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie.  Numbers in brackets are endnotes.

 

     With the decay in the social value of public speaking and the general fading of the Classical tradition, the role of oratory in education, once so prominent, has all but vanished.  Only a few generations ago, the brightest secondary students competed in declamation competitions and participated in Mock Trial exercises that would have been recognizable to an ancient Athenian.  For two thousand years many wrote about rhetoric as the definitive art of the effective use of language and drew examples from both poetry and speeches.  Though there are significant exceptions, many literary theorists have used the vocabulary of rhetoric from Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Quintilian and Cicero, through medieval writers like Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland.  The most important Elizabethan work in this lineage is George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) which, though entirely concerned with poetry, employs the concepts of earlier rhetorical manuals.  While Puttenham thus roots his work deeply in past authorities, he is nonetheless able to use it to develop and express sophisticated, sometimes novel, concepts.  He is far more pragmatic than theoretical, tolerant of contradictions in the interest of presenting a full description view of poetry.  On a good many matters he is unwilling “to commit himself and holds the balance between the contesting parties,” as a modern critic comments on his posture regarding the use of rhyme and of learned vocabulary. [1]

     Puttenham’s rhetorical orientation was standard in his own day [2], but his use of it was unusually pragmatic, rigorous, and productive.  He fully understands the arbitrary nature of the relation between signifier and signified, noting, “speech it selfe is artificiall and made by man,” [3] yet, in a dialectical gesture that recurs throughout his work, he also says “VTterance also and language is giuen by nature to man for perswasion of others.” (I, 4) 

     A parallel ambiguity is reflected in his opening claim that the poet is a “maker” and thus in a way divine while at the same time being a “counterfaitor” who simply imitates the world around since “Poesie an art not only of making, but also of imitation.”  (I, 1)   Similarly he is elusive, or, rather, pleased to affirm both options, on the old issue of whether a poet is born or artistic skill must be learned, observing that poetic skill might “come by nature or by arte or by exercise.” (III, 2)

     Puttenham declares that the poet must be inspired “by some diuine instinct, the Platonicks call it furor.” (I, 1)  This special access to truth led to poets’ role as “Prophetes or seears” (I, 3), giving birth then to religion since the first role of poetry is “the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods.” (I, 9)  Poets then created culture, civilization, and all the arts and sciences.    

      Yet these grand roles seem forgotten when he treats poetry as a courtly accomplishment.  Puttenham, writing in the wake of Castiglione [4], describes his work as is “fitter to please the Court then the schoole” and claims that his “chiefe purpose herein is for the learning of Ladies and young Gentlewomen, or idle Courtiers, desirous to become skilful in their owne mother tongue, and for their priuate recreation to make now & then ditties of pleasure.” (III,10)  This paradoxically studied off-handedness is surely itself a form of sprezzatura or Renaissance “cool.”  A wider gap could scarcely exist than between this aestheticism and the pious author who defined the first function of poetry as “the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods,” followed by cdelebrating princes, then “the praise of vertue & reproofe of vice, the instruction of morall doctrines, the reuealing of sciences naturall & other profitable Arts, the redresse of boistrous & sturdie courages by perswasion.”  Only then does he accept also “the consolation and repose of temperate myndes, finally the common solace of mankind in all his trauails and cares of this transitorie life.” (I, 9)

     The dialectical nature of aesthetic language is also reflected, Puttenham recognizes, by another sort of doubling, the operation of novel figurative language over the inherited formulae of everyday speech.  In the gap between expected usage and artfully twisted figure is born beauty and delight, new thoughts, and courtliness, an aristocratic cultivated style.  Puttenham calls “our ordinary talke then which nothing can be more vnsauourie and farre from all ciuilitie.” (III,2)  According to him the beauty of both women and poems depends upon their being “artificially handled.”  “The discreet vsing” of figures” in writing is like the use of ornament in clothing and “other mechanicall artes” requiring taste. (III,1)  He quotes Horace on changing fashions in language as in other matters. (III, 3)

     “Figuratiue speech is a noueltie of language euidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the ordinarie habite and manner of our dayly talke and wri∣ting”  (III, 10)  Novelty seems a requirement since poetry’s appeal derives from “a certaine noueltie and strange maner of conueyance, dis∣guising it no litle from the ordinary and accustomed.” (III, 1)  Yet at the same time, every new work is built upon the old and new fashions are often accepted, “though many tymes worse then the old.” (I.7)

     Poetry may not only be in bad taste; it also may mislead, since the domain of poetry includes lying as well as truth-telling, as Hesiod had had it in one of the earliest formulations of art’s ambiguous character.   Puttenham cautions that “poesie should not be imployed vpon vayne conceits or vicious or infamous.” (I, 8)  He dramatizes the negative potential of poetry with the cautionary story of Hegesias (III, 8) whose words, according to Cicero [5], persuaded people to suicide with his words.

     Yet he feels that it is not the failings of poetry, but rather a failure of appreciation by those who should be its consumers that poetry has lost prestige since ancient times, in spite of its once central place in all culture, to the extent that the poet is labeled “light headed.”  Poets as well as “Poesie are despised, & the name become, of honorable infamous, subiect to scorne and derision.”  He says that a poet, instead of being respected, is likely to be called “in disdayne a phantasticall” man. (I, 8) 

     In the course of his compendious volume, Puttenham provides a rich exposition of rhetorical figures and an invaluable guide to the taste of his day, but the reader looking for a coherent theory will find a wealth of ideas but little system.  Thus language is said to be wholly artificial and man-made as well as given by nature.  Poetry is wholly original, created as though by divine fiat and, at the same time, imitation or “counterfeit.”  Powerful poetry is at once the result of a “divine instinct” and the imitation of models.  The ends of poetry could not be more ambitious – praise of god and inculcation of morality – and yet it is also a “priuate recreation” pastime for “idle Courtiers.”  Poetic language must be fresh and novel, yet it must also follow accepted models.  A poet, finally, he finds, might be valued as the most acute and inventive thinker, the sort he calls “euphantasiote” but also might be “dismissed and derided.” (III, 8)  All these propositions may indeed be true at once – art is more adept than other forms of discourse in handling contradiction and ambiguity – but Puttenham is unconcerned with delineating the tensions among these antinomies. 

     For him poetry’s fallen status calls for a heart-felt lament resting on the notion of a bygone Golden Age rather than a specific program for its returning to relevance.  Even apart from the marvelous catalogue of figures his book is a useful record of the ideas current in his day and what he knew or took to be the opinions of the past.  The venerable study of rhetoric broadly conceived which had formed the foundation of education for millennia underlies Puttenham’s careful work, recording rather than reconciling the contradictions and mysteries that have always characterized art.  If he affirms opposites, it is because only in that way might he provide an accurate picture of his (and of our) lived experience of literature.  

 

 

1.      1.  Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature (1930), 357.

 

2.      2.  Among his predecessors extending the tradition in England were Richard Sherry, A Treatise on Schemes and Tropes (1550), Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Angel Day, The English Secretorie (1586), and Abraham Fraunce The Arcadian Rhetorick (1588), and Henry Peacham The Compleat Gentleman (1622).  Some critics, notably Sir Philip Sidney, focused, somewhat defensively, on a moral defense rather than a broader view of art’s ends and a technical analysis of poetic devices.      

 

3.      3.  Similarly, “SPeach is not naturall to man” (III, 3).

 

4.      4.  Castiglione’s The Courtier, the influence of which on Puttenham and others can hardly be overstated, had been translated in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby.

 

5.      5.  Tusculan Disputations 1.83.

Euphemism as Metaphor

This piece is neither scholarly nor exhaustive. It aims rather to be familiar and recreational after the fashion of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature.



     As the name suggests, the point of a euphemism to substitute a more safe or decorous word for one too charged with anxiety or desire. Inevitably, every euphemism is a sort of figure of speech, a variety of allegory in the broader etymological sense of “saying something other” than what is meant. Thus euphemisms share with other figures the pleasure of wit and surprise that accompanies all such doublings as well as their semantic extension. The euphemistic expression does not merely occlude or replace the avoided one; it adds new elements of meaning as well, beginning with the charge of energy that accompanies entering a restricted zone of language or approaching taboos. Each example provides a model, often simple, of how poetic language in colloquial usage enriches and condenses meaning.
     Euphemisms, like jokes, collect about nodes of human insecurity such as the divine, the ego, death, intoxication, sex, and scatology. Every euphemism by its very nature bears the nervous energy of treading in a no man’s land in inadequate disguise. Even empty sounds like “blankety-blank” or television’s bleep that masks improper language make all listeners ears prick up the with the conviction that what is being said must be of unusual interest. The visual cue of a series of symbols in a comic strip indicating profanity (called a grawlix [1]) draws attention to the utterance and intensifies it. The effect of substituting a harmless term for one in some way emotionally charged is, in fact, always paradoxical. While avoiding a tabooed usage the euphemism inevitably draws attention to the altered word, introducing a tone suggesting nervousness or a wink and a nod which in fact highlights the usage dramatically. [2]
     The most ancient use of euphemisms may have arisen from wariness over using god’s name or the names of dead ancestors, or, indeed, one’s own name. The archaic identification of signifier and signified suggested that naming the supernatural might attract unwelcome attention from the divine and the deceased, unless strict ritual rules were observed. In many cultures a conjuring may be regarded as effective if the magician knows the name of person at whom a charm is directed.
     The Cretan king Rhadamanthus was said to have forbidden swearing by the gods, mandating that people swear instead by animals. [3] To avoid exciting their unwanted attention, the chthonic deities governing vengeance retribution, the Erinyes (Furies) were called Eumenides (or the Benevolent Ones). They often were invoked in association with oath-taking, for they punished those who swore to a lie. Aeschylus tells in The Eumenides how they were tamed by Athena and called thereafter the Venerable Ones or Semnai.
      Jews, Muslims, and Christians are well aware of the ancient Hebrew use of bynames to substitute for the deity’s name. Thus in the secular love poetry of the Song of Songs the repeated phrases by the roes, and by the hinds of the field are euphemistic forms of Hebrew oaths. God’s bynames are chosen with the greatest care. Phonically each resembles a conventional divine appellation. [4] Further, worship of animals (such as the golden calf) was common in the ancient Near East. One scholar at least thinks that these expressions are genuine pagan oaths to nature deities. [5]
     The Orthodox today avoid writing or saying God’s proper name, the tetragrammaton, using a wide variety of euphemisms, most of which specify god’s nature, such as Almighty (El Shaddai) or Lord of Hosts (Adonai Tzva'ot, suggesting military leadership). At times they simply write G-d, a curious example of writing a word while simultaneously canceling it.
     Of course, the most common euphemisms for God today, called minced oaths, arise from phonetic similarity and contribute no semantic information: gee, gosh, and the like. Even in the twenty-first century the magical belief that hearing oaths is somehow deleterious to children remains all but universal. Vestiges linger of the notion that women, too, must never hear such expressions.
     The anxiety produced by thoughts of mortality is ameliorated sometimes by euphemisms expressing religious faith and the confident expectation of an afterlife: meeting one’s maker, to go to one’s reward. Some churches call funerals a homecoming. Other expressions by their levity represent a kind of whistling in the dark: kick the bucket, bite the dust, [6], buy the farm, and the like. Cockney rhyming slang is, as usual, more oblique, offering the mildly comforting brown bread for dead.
     In modern times we associate euphemisms with sexual and excretory activities. A word directly naming the place we excrete (such as defecation room) almost never appears, nor does the term describing the apparatus most commonly used today, the water closet. Though today it may seem an unpleasant word because of its association, the word toilet was in origin a diminutive of toile and referred to a small cloth on which grooming tools were laid out. Powder room likewise suggests primping rather than peeing. [7] Similarly, latrine may bring to mind a reeking hole in the dirt, but it at first (like lavatory or, of course, washroom or bathroom) signified a place to clean oneself. Such terms reinforce the sense of purgation and purity that may follow excretion. In rest room the semantic element of relaxation following what might be called doing one’s business has become so generalized as to retain little force. Others, such as privy and the Spanish necessario, are even more oblique. More concrete are the associations of the British term bog referring at first to an open cess-pit.
     The delicate education of children about reproductive activities may be simply called the facts of life, which washes the topic of social hazard, or the birds and the bees, suggesting the continuity of all life. Since France is considered sexually naughty, saying au naturel clothes nakedness in the discreet tones of another language while genteelly retaining its sauciness.
     Vague words such as thing, stuff, or it and nonsense words can serve as general, all-purpose euphemisms. In a curious example of a euphemism recrossing into proscribed language a drug user who might refer to his stash as his shit, while an artist might use the same term to refer to his recent works. Presumably the high, whether aesthetically or chemically induced, is particularly charged for the junkie or the painter, both of whom are likely to be contemptuous of bourgeois standards. A bumper sticker reading stuff happens is understood as meaning shit happens, in which shit represents all possible undesirable events. Clara Bow was the It Girl whose film It appeared in 1927, and a teenager today might ask a friend, “Did you do it?” The 1928 song “Makin’ Whoopee” popularized by Eddie Cantor and “My Dingaling,” a hit for Chuck Berry in 1972 are examples of the use of neologisms to suggest sexual meanings, though they are not quite arbitrary. Whoopee with its insistent doubled vowels, certainly suggests the rush of joy that might accompany sex, while the jocular dingaling is comically associated with the dangling male genitalia.
     The socially dangerous condition of intoxication is likewise hedged about by a rich growth of euphemism. Blasted and bombed acknowledge the destructive loss of function that accompanies drunkenness, while buzzed suggests the quickened hum in the inner ear associated with a lesser chemical alteration of consciousness. Cockneys nod ironically to high culture with Brahms and Liszt, which rhymes with pissed. Many other areas of life, money, for instance, disability, and aging, also attract euphemistic usages.
     Steven Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill [8] to describe the succession of terms that result when a once proper term has come to seem inadequate or offensive. Americans of a certain age saw the polite usage turn from colored to Negro, and then to black (sometimes Black), and finally African-American. Notoriously, terms like idiot, moron, and imbecile were once clinical terms designating degrees of cognitive limitation more scientifically (it seemed) than the generic feeble-minded of an earlier era only to be replaced in the middle of the twentieth century by retarded, then developmentally disabled. The DSM-5 uses intellectual disability. The hospital psychiatric department where my wife worked changed from Mental Health Unit to Behavioral Health Unit as though behavior defined the problem for depressive and psychotic alike. It must have sounded more polite to somebody.
     In their most efficient uses, euphemisms have a spark of wit and a flowering of suggestive imagery. For instance, an American might tell a man whose trouser fly is unzipped, “Uh-oh, the barn door is open.” This form communicates the information while adding the amusement of a sort of riddle, the levity of humor, to defuse the topic’s awkwardness while retaining an implication of the power of Eros which, it suggests, is bestial and only in part controllable.
     It may seem a rebuke to the pretentions of language itself that among the ancient Greek meanings of the word euphemism, along with the use of words of good omen and abstention from those of bad and praise-singing, is the solemn silence during religious rites, as though stillness might well displace our endless flow of verbiage. Euphemism, though, far from simply blocking verbal signification, heightens meaning and increases semantic precision, transmitting values and entertaining at the same time.



1. The term was coined by Beetle Bailey artist Mort Walker in 1964. They are also called jams and nittles. Such symbols had been used, however, at least since December 14, 1902 in Rudolf Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids strip. In the grawlixes of sailors Uncle Heinle and John Silver, anchors are featured.
Walker named a number of other comic conventions as well in his book Lexicon of Comicana (1980). For instance, he called the visible cloud of dust generated by a character’s departure a briffit and plewds for the nimbus of sweat around an anxious character.

2. Words that do bear specific meanings may be eroded through vulgar usage to the same status or even less. With occasional use the word “fucking” may function as an intensifier, but in the discourse of a person whose every sentence includes several uses of the word even that is lost and the word, originally so potent, comes to mean nothing more than a pause during which “uh” escapes from the throat.

3. Porphyry, De Abstinentia III.16. For Porphyry this law suggests arguments in favor of vegetarianism. Divine animals and semi-bestial deities are, of course, common in archaic times. Rhadamanthus became proverbial for wisdom and later was described as one of the judges of the dead.

4. This occurs first in verses 2.7 and 3.5. The sound of the Hebrew for “roes” is similar to either (’elohey) ṣᵉba’ot '(God of) Hosts' or (YHWH) ṣᵉba’ot '(Jehovah is) Armies' and that for “hinds” to ’el šadday 'El Shaddai'. The association is explicit in the Targum.

5. See David McLain Carr’s “Rethinking Sex and Spirituality: The Song of Songs and Its Readings,” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 81, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998), pp. 413-435.

6. This idiom, with its American Old West associations, is curiously similar to the Homeric expression that might be translated as “bite the earth.”

7. Pee itself is a euphemism to avoid saying piss.

8. “The Name of the Game,” in the New York Times for April 4, 2005.

Riddles and Poetry

     When the Hatter poses a riddle, asking Alice, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” she is pleased and thinks “Come, we shall have some fun now! I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles,” but, when she gives up and asks for the answer, the Hatter replies, “I haven’t the slightest idea.” This annoys Alice. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.” The fact is that Carroll, for all his fondness for puzzles, had no particular solution in mind, and, indeed, people have found powerful reasons for posing answerless riddles, but he was asked to provide one often enough that he devised an elaborately clever possibility: "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar [sic] put with the wrong end in front!" [1]
     Alice’s eager initial response indicates that riddling was a familiar party pastime in the Victorian Age; today it is surely more informal and likely to be restricted to child’s play, but riddles play a fundamental role in the structure of sophisticated cognition. In many cultures they have been a repository for religious mystery and a mother of poetry, a focus for displays of verbal elegance and wit.
     Riddles have this central historic role for good reason. The word itself, as Northrup Frye notes “was originally the cognate object of read.” [2] Though this is misleading in the sense that riddles can be purely oral, it does point to the form’s dependence on a material verbal formula, a text whether spoken or read. The earliest written characters are all pictographic, of course, and before writing developed, all language had been elaborated with metaphors, beginning with the entirely unmotivated correspondence between a sound and a meaning. A great many words, including all abstractions, lack visual representation altogether and can be built only upon direct signifiers of visible objects. One may imagine language developing through a very prolonged process of riddle-posing and solving. Even in oral cultures, verbal facility came to be associated with intelligence, leadership, and access to the divine, and riddles provided a framework for displaying advanced skills in both imagination and interpretation. To cite Frye once more, riddles require “a fusion of sensation and reflection, the use of an object of sense experience to stimulate a mental activity in connection with it.” In this way they build upon the ability of language to evoke absent or nonexistent objects by adding openings that encourage the generation of new connections, different associations, and the ability to think things never before thought.
     In much of this riddles resemble poetry. One distinguishing mark of the aesthetic text is its use of rhetorical figures or sound, speech, and thought, the common property of which is the signification of something other or something more than the words might bear in a different context, allegory in the broadest sense. Metaphor is the most important figure, and every metaphor is a riddle. The reader of poetry, language’s most densely information-bearing code, must figure out how it is that a lover is like “a red, red rose.” Quite clearly, Old English and Old Norse kennings are riddles: whale road for sea, raven feeder for warrior. Expertise in riddles was considered a sign of ability in symbolic manipulation generally, that is to say, in thinking and was used by the intelligentsia both in training and in display. The Exeter Book contains nearly a hundred riddles as well as much traditional wisdom, noting that “Wise men should exchange wise words.” [4] The final term of this sententia is giedd which Sweet defines as “song, poem, speech, narrative, tale, proverb, riddle,” in other words, any literary or rhetorical use of language.
     The Rig Veda contains many riddles the solving of which “became a formalized demonstration of the knowledge of the priests taking part in the sacrifice.” [5] A brahmodya was a riddling contest between learned pandits or between a Brahmin priest and a lay sacrificer. [6] Mythic models for such verbal contention exist in the Mahabharata’s account of Aṣṭāvakra’s defeat of Bandī in disputation and Yudhiṣṭhira’s successful answers to a Yakṣa’s questions. [7]
     The same skills were prized in ancient Greece. One thinks of the riddle of the Sphinx (which, in fact, has been also reported in Bihar) [8] and the many enigmatic and ambiguous pronouncements of the oracles. The riddler Cleobulus was celebrated as one of the Seven Sages, and he has a reputed female counterpart in Cleobulina . [9] To Aristotle, riddles are at the root of poetry and thus of wisdom: “clever enigmas furnish good metaphors; for metaphor is a kind of enigma, so that it is clear that the transference is clever.” [10] In his discussions with the Indian sages the Greeks called gymnosophists Alexander is reported to have posed puzzled problems to rebellious wise men with the intention of executing those who could not answer. [11]
     By the time of Athenaeus [12] riddles retained some of their association with wisdom, but this use already seemed to some old-fashioned. Clearchus is quoted as saying “the solution of riddles is not alien to philosophy, and the ancients used to make a display of their knowledge by means of them.” (575) Yet they were an expected part of social gathering in late antiquity and not only among the literati. The same Clearchus defines a riddle in a way that clearly implies a party game. “A riddle is a problem put in jest, requiring, by searching the mind, the answer to the problem to be given for a prize or forfeit.” (531) People were required to offer riddles during drinking bouts (534) and then, if they failed to solve them, were obliged to drink wine mixed with brine. (575) The largest collection of ancient Greek riddles is that of Symphosius whose preface declares that they are to be used in gay festival celebrations during the Saturnalia.
     This late Latin text fascinated the early Christians and collections were made by a number of authors, including Englishmen whose own literary tradition independently prized the riddle such as Aldhelm, Tatwine, and Eusebius (the 8th c. Northumbrian bishop) as well as elsewhere in Europe. [12] Aldhelm based many of his riddles on Symphosius, but not his final, culminating poem "Creatura" which adapts a passage of the Corpus Hermeticum. [14] With its answer “creation” this final poem was clearly meant as a “master-riddle” the study of which would parallel one’s contemplation of the world itself as a meditative technique to further spiritual growth.
     Though a portion of “Creatura” is missing, its method is clear and systematic. Just as the typical strategy of common riddles is to describe something and then add a term that makes the apparent interpretation impossible, here Aldhelm weaves a rich texture of paradox and contradiction while bathing the whole in an exhilarated jouissance in both the older and the post-structuralist senses. The author seeks to enwrap everything in his words, the entire cosmos before which he can only wonder. [15] He uses terms like wrætlice (l. 6) to emphasize the artful beauty of existence and wynlic (l. 26) to signify the joy that comes from apprehending the creation’s “secrets.” (l. 39 deagol þing) The poem bristles with paradox in its ambition to include everything. The answer to the riddle embodies and surpasses all dualities: it is asleep and awake, timid and bold, hot and cold, large and small, stinking and sweet. This riddle is one of the purest manifestations of literature’s ability to express ambivalences, self-contradictions, the irrational, and the mysterious. It is a verbal enactment of Tertullian’s famous formula “it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd” or the contention of the pseudo- Dionysius that "Duality is never a principle (arche). A unity (monas) is always the principle of every duality." [16]
     Aldhelm’s last riddle is poetic not only in its exploitation of contradictions and its exposition of mystery, but also in its rich texture of specific images: a black and reeking fen, the boar rooting about in the forest, cast-up seaweed, comb dripping with honey. There can never be quite enough because they are meant to signify everything. According to a recent translator the riddles of the Rig Veda are meant, to be unanswerable and in that way to dramatically indicate not a revealed truth, but an area of unknowing. [17] There is no space here even to initiate a treatment of the riddles of all riddles, Zen koans. [18] In the thousand years since since Dahui Zonggao’s time and doubtless since the dawn of language, people have used riddles and other poetic devices to plumb the very deepest reaches if existence in a way that other forms of discourse cannot reach.
     I have focused on the kinship of riddles to poetry and philosophy, and, if my path has seemed leisurely, I have at least avoided such divagations as the Quechua-speaking peoples whose teen-agers hold riddle parties to flirt and meet the opposite sex away from adult eyes, the Indonesian and Filipino riddling at funerals, the vast field of Mongolian riddles, and the sizable body of Arabic work (such as al-Hariri’s Maqāma). A monograph could be written on obscene riddling, on riddling as political propaganda, not to mention the largest body of modern examples: children’s riddles.
     Figures of speech destabilize meaning only in order to render it more precise. The can be no end to metaphor because each individual thing has some things in common and some differences with every other individual thing. Riddling exposes the limitations of habit-bound thought, encourages new, leaping insight, and yet implies a skepticism about any firm ground for reality. Riddles are deeply implicated in language itself with its ability to represent lies, things not present, and things never before thought as well as in its secondary elaboration of poetry, the verbal technology by which people entertain themselves and seek insight and rejuvenated vision. Riddling, like poetry, both teaches and delights , wrenching language until a laugh breaks out, a preconception gives way, or, it may be, the soul feels, for a moment or two, buoyant.



1. Before and after Carroll’s preface to the second edition in which he proposed this answer, others have devised alternatives which range from the ingenious to the clumsy. Among them perhaps the most elegant is that of the great puzzler Sam Loyd: "Poe wrote on both." Though many had suggested “They both contain the letter ‘R’, it was Aldous Huxley who proposed "Because there is a 'b' in both and an 'n' in neither" which is to some fittingly absurd. In The Shining Stephen King provides, “The higher you go, the less of them there are” which seems disappointing. Many other ideas may be located with a few minutes searching, among them “because they both have inky quills,” “a writing desk is a rest for pens and a raven is a pest for wrens,” “they both stand on sticks,” “because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes,” and “because that which is never backward is always forwards, and a raven is nevar backward, and a writing desk is always for words.” The phenomenon illustrates the human propensity to find meaning and pattern in anything.

2. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, (Atheneum: New York, 1967), p. 280.

3. Ibid.

4. Gleawe men sceolon gieddum wrixlan. Maxims I (A). For a treatment of the place of riddles in Old English see Rafal Boryslawski, “The Elements of Anglo-Saxon Wisdom Poetry in the Exeter Book Riddles,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies, Vol. 38, Summer 2002. W. P. Ker says “It is the proper business, one might say, of Old English poetry to call things out of their proper name.” (The Dark Ages, New York: Scribner’s, 1904 p. 92)

5. Rig Veda, Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, OUP, 2014, p. 70

6. See George Thompson, “The Brahmodya and Vedic Discourse,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 1, Jan. - Mar. 1977 and Louis Renou’s Hymnes et Prières du Veda.

7. For discussion of whether the questions and solutions are of Greek (Cynical) origin or indigenous to India see Aleksandra Szal, “Alexander’s Dialogue with Indian Philosophers: Riddle in Greek and Indian Tradition,” Commentationes, Eos XCVIII 2011.

8. Ibid.

9. Cleobulus was the author of riddles in poetry as well as of such simple maxims as “seek virtue and eschew vice," "instruct your children," and “avoid injustice.” Cleobulina’s work is described by Diotimus of Olympene according to Athenaeus. She is attested by many ancient references, cited by Aristotle in both the Poetics and the Rhetoric. At least two lost plays (by Alexis and by Cratinus) with her name in the title are known, and three extant poems are attributed to her. See Ian Michael Plant, Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology, University of Oklahoma, p. 29 ff.

10. Rhetoric 3.2.12. Aristotle uses the word αἴνιγμα.

11. See also the Ashtavakra.

12. See Charles Burton Gulick, editor and translator, Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Loeb Library, 1930, vol. 4, Bk. X, ch. 5. Page numbers in parentheses refer this edition.

13. Collections were made elsewhere in Europe as well and the scholarly Latin culture was to a certain extent cosmopolitan. Tullius, for example, the author of a book of aenigmata is thought to have been in Italy like his namesake Cicero, though he had perhaps come originally from Ireland. Aldhelm’s is contained within his Epistola ad Acircium as part of the treatise on meter, indicating the close affinity of riddles and poetry.

14. Its source is the Corpus Hermeticum, Treatise XI, 20, where the Divine Intellect, the Mind of God is addressing Hermes Trismegistus. According to Michael Lapidge Aldhelm’s poems should be called mysteries rather than riddles because of their religious content. See his Anglo-Latin Literature, vol. 1 600-899, A&C Black, 1996, p. 9.

15. The Greek word kosmos itself means well-arranged, orderly, beautiful, artful.

16. Tertullian, De Carne Christi, V, 4: "prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est." pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, 4,21. Compare the Buddha’s words in the Lankavatara Sutra “all that is of duality has its rise from the Mind.”.

17. See Wendy Doniger, The Rig Veda, Penguin, 1981. In my use of the term I am thinking of the English The Cloud of Unknowing.

18. I use the Japanese term in conformity with common American usage, though the three principal collections are Chinese: The Blue Cliff Record, The Book of Equanimity (or Serenity), and The Gateless Gate.

Allusion

     I have placed this in the theory category because it concerns the use of allusion in all literature and uses as evidence examples from an ancient text from Rome and modern ones from England and the USA. I realize I have constructed a somewhat discursive argument. Perhaps some readers will find relish the casual rolling motion with which I turn from one topic to another. I have long felt that literary scholars, who of all people are aware that form is indeed content, are far too slavish followers of a single highly standardized pattern in their own essays.
     Though many before me have noted the links from Horace to Dowson to Porter, I believe my use of them to make a point about allusion is original.



     Horace is a great poet of self-contradiction. He can write convincingly on behalf of voluptuary pastimes as well as of frugal sobriety; he is at once a man of patriotic idealism and a slavish sycophant; a common-sense Everyman of conventional opinions one moment, he is a decadent aesthete the next. The opening ode in his fourth book which begins “Intermissa, Venus” seems a sincere and moving statement of middle-aged erotic ambivalence until one notes Suetonius’ comment that he returned to the form after having taken leave of it only at the command of Augustus. (Indeed, some critics view the entire fourth book as an artifice to contain the poems praising the reign of the emperor whom the poet once opposed on the battlefield.)
     The persona begs Venus for relief, pleading age (he is fifty) and suggests she settle on a younger, more appropriate man to afflict with love, perhaps a certain Paulus Maximus. Should he find erotic success, this man will surely make her a worthy sacrifice – which the poet then describes in such extraordinary sensual terms – evoking visions of flutes, lyre, and pan-pipes and a chorus of dancing boys and girls -- that the poet finds himself aroused in spite of his intentions. As if to convince himself he declares he no longer takes pleasure in amours, “nec femina nec puer,” not even in drinking. Yet this very claim leads instantly to a tear at the thought of his frustrated love for Ligurinus which so affects him that he claims to be stricken silent, though the poem works its way without pause. The piece ends with a poignant image of the poet’s one-time lover receding in a dream, pursued across the Campus Martius, over streams, always just beyond reach, an eloquent image for desire.
     This scenario is beautiful and moving in itself, far more of course in Horace’s ever-so-artfully chosen words than in paraphrase, but the modern reader is likely to miss a significant element in the author’s intention. Even many who can read the Latin are unskilled in meter. Classical verse forms are difficult for English speakers to appreciate. The very use of quantitative meters and the rich variety of available patterns, each of them flexible in prescribed ways, produce effects virtually impossible to reproduce in translation. The reading of a really accomplished classicist who can melodiously respect vowel quantity in Greek or Latin lyric poetry while also observing accent and pitch in a fluid and expressive flow of words is very rare and very beautiful, a phenomenon, like a string quartet well-played by a one-man band.
     Still, the modern reader can scarcely doubt the importance in Horace’s own judgment of his use of particular meters. To support his claim to lasting fame the sole specific Horace offers (in 3.30) is that he, in the words of Pound’s translation, "first brought Aeolic song to Italian fashion" (“princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos”), in other words, he imported Greek metrical patterns adapting them for the Latin language.
     The place of Greece as a source for Roman science, philosophy, and art was acknowledged, paralleling in some ways the role of China for Japan, though one might also cite the importation of Continental verse forms to England by Chaucer. The neoteroi of Catullus’ generation admired the Alexandrian Greeks, and Horace himself spent time in Athens doing advanced studies. So the initial meaning of a poet’s using Greek meters would be simply to identify himself as a savant. Horace’s use of the term Aeolian points directly to the work of Alkaios and Sappho, and there can be little doubt that the Latin poet intended for associations from the earlier writers to be part of his own effects. His use of Greek prosody constituted an allusion, implying that his own words could be fully understood only in connection with theirs. Commentators have long noted specific parallels with the two Lesbian poets, but in the broadest sense it is surely their passionate expression of love is their primary association.
     Just as Doric was associated with choral odes in Greek and the Epic literary dialect with Homeric or mock-Homeric content, the use of Aeolic carried erotic connotations. Horace, writing in Latin, could not use these Greek dialects but he could use the earlier poets’ meters. Many of his odes are in Sapphics and Alkaics, while “Intermissa, Venus” is in Asklepiadics, another pattern rich in choriambs. While most of the poetry of Asklepiades is lost, enough remains to suggest its likely character. Two versions by the Imagist poet Edwin A. Storer will provide a sample of Asklepiades’ tone. [1]


The Crown of Spring

     Sweet for the thirsty in summer is snow to drink; sweet for sailors after winter’s storms to see the crown of spring, but sweeter still when beneath one cloak two lovers lie, giving their thanks to Kypris.

At the Porch

     It is winter and the night is long. The Pleiades have travelled half their span, and I am passing by this door all wet with the rain.
     Suffering from her treachery, I long for her.
     O Kypris, it is not love you have sent me; it is some cruel shaft tipped with flame.

     It is clear that the meter for Horace was a significant allusion, a sign of the sort of verse he meant to compose, a code that has in modern times become obscure except to specialists. This is, of course, unsurprising, considering that Latin has been little spoken for a millennium and a half and that English speakers are not generally conscious of vowel quantity, but the fact is that most modern readers of English poetry are nearly equally deaf to the associations of poetic forms in their own language. People accustomed to the most casual and colloquial free verse have for the most part lost the ability to catch allusions in prosody apart from the very simplest. Tetrameters are likely to be perceived as more natural than pentameters and the sonnet remains recognizable, but the associations of most meters and stanza forms are lost on the general reader, resulting in a significantly impoverished reception of texts both old and new.
     The fin de siècle British writer Ernest Dowson uses a line from Horace’s ode as the title of his “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae,” though his meter is not English, Greek, or Latin, but rather French Alexandrines. In Horace the line “I am not as I was under the rule of the good Cynara” is nostalgic, referring to the speaker’s advancing age which, he says, has rendered him a poor candidate for Venus’ attentions. For Dowson on the other hand Cynara is his current courtly beloved, unattainable and perfect, of whom he thinks while having sex with a prostitute. [2] Like most love songs, this is a lack-love song. To be sure, the speaker has the kisses of a “bought red mouth,” but he is “desolate,” “sick,” and haunted by desire even as he calls “for madder music and for stronger wine.”
     The basis for the allusion, the similarity of the two Cynaras, is simply their unavailability. Whereas Horace had initially complained only of the universal decline that comes with age, Dowson possesses only too much vital energy, finding that no matter how “riotously” he flings roses, he cannot banish the shadow of the one he truly loves. The memory of Horace then simultaneously reinforces the fundamental feeling, the pain of the lover’s absence, and, by the contrast between the ancient and the modern poet, heightens for Dowson’s reader the lurid dramatic situation of Dowson’s persona. To the reader familiar with Horace, the allusion first engages by what is shared by the two unsatisfied lovers, but its effect is then complicated and enriched by their differences. Allusion quite commonly has an ironic intent, and the bathetic fall from ancient ideals to a reduced modernity is familiar from countless twentieth century works of which Joyce’s Ulysses is perhaps the most prominent example. Here, as in a great many instances, the allusive reference suggests an entire complex of relationships, some direct, some inverted, some otherwise skewed.
     A far greater gap than that between the lyrics of Horace and Dowson is that between Dowson and Cole Porter who appropriated Dowson’s chorus line that ends each stanza “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion” for his song from Kiss me, Kate “Always True to You in My Fashion.” Here Lois seeks to reassure her lover Bill, uneasy about her liaisons with sugar daddies, a full dozen of whom are detailed. The list retains the listener’s interest as it ranges from the expected (“a big tycoon in steel,” “an oilman known as ‘Tex’”) to the unlikely (“a wealthy Hindu priest”) and the edgy (“a madman known as Mack”), and concluding with a real person, Clark Gable. The tone is entirely flippant, but the singer proclaims her loyalty to her Bill, asking

How in hell can you be jealous
When you know, baby, I'm your slave?
I'm just mad for you
And I'll always be

     Porter’s playful amorality has nothing whatever in common with Dowson’s tortured and obsessive love. Indeed, for those familiar with the earlier poem, the allusion only enhances the libertine freedom of Porter’s high-spirited lyric. Further, one may safely assume that most listeners will be innocent of any knowledge of Dowson. In spite of this, his poem has left its traces by providing Porter’s starting point, and it underlies the thematic impulse of the lyrics.
     The song’s other allusions, mentions of Schlitz beer, Cadillac cars, and a “vet” (the show was staged in 1948), as well as the reference to Clark Gable, serve to provide a patina of contemporary relevance, a kind of sparkling topicality, that invites the Broadway audience members to believe that the song is about their own lives. This is not so very different from Horace’s references to Venus and Cupid as well as Cynara, Ligurinus, and Paulus Maximus, the last three of whom are thought to be historical figures.
     Allusion, like other rhetorical figures, [3] characterizes the aesthetic text. The study of rhetoric in this sense was for centuries the heart of literary theory and the foundation of practical criticism. In general such figures permit the expression of new thought and content that could not be formulated in ordinary transparent prose as well as aspiring to beauty. All literature, of course, must be built from the base of the previous body of writing. Pointed instances of allusion may have a number of functions, among them to vault the new text into the realm of art (in intention at least), to indicate universality, to decorate (either aesthetically or intellectually), to compress information, to thicken the meaning of all poetry, and ironic or other troping on the earlier text. This series from Horace to Dowson to Porter illustrates the importance and yet the subtle complexity and variety of allusive references, a figure of speech that requires the audience’s competent familiarity with the pre-existing tradition.



1. The Windflowers of Asklepiades and The Poems of Poseidippos, translated by Edward Storer; from The Poet’s Translation Series, Second Set, No. 5; London: The Egoist Press, 1920; pp. 3-17. The translations are also viewable on line at http://elfinspell.com/ClassicalTexts/Poetry/Asklepiades-Poseidippos/Storer-Asklepiades.html.

2. Biographical critics will identify her with Adelaide "Missie" Foltinowicz, the restauranteur’s daughter and sometime waitress with whom he had been smitten when she was eleven. When she was fifteen, he proposed to her and was rejected.

3. I will not trouble myself over the terminology of rhetorical figures which have been classified also as tropes and schemata and analyzed into figures of thought, of speech, of sound, and of syntax, For the present purpose a rhetorical figure is any usage by which a written passage conveys meaning beyond the direct literal signification.

Transformation of Convention

This is the beginning of my Transformation of Convention in the Medieval European Love Lyric. I hope to shed light on the problem of literary novelty by demonstrating that literary convention is used equally by those who employ recognizable convention and by those who defy, twist, or alter them. The establishment of a convention creates an instant potential for its repetition, but also for its inversion or twisting or omission. Two hundred years of Romantic criticism has obscured the fact that it is through convention and play with reader expectations that the semantic density of the literary text is enhanced.

Though this introduction is almost wholly theoretical, I am posting at the same time an example of the transformation I describe in the discussion of the English folk song “The Three Ravens.”


The dialectic between tradition and innovation in literature is little understood, though it stands at the heart of many critical disputes of the present day and has often been similarly important in past centuries. Very frequently the staging ground for the erection of literary barricades, the consistent centrality of the question is indeed more revealing than many of the positions partisans have taken up around it.

Harold Bloom when he speaks of the "anxiety of influence" as the major generative force as well as the major blocking force in literary production is unusually subtle in recognizing the complementary attraction and repulsion of the past, though the emotional weight which he assigns to either may be more historically or idiosyncratically limited than he admits. Such effective associations, though, are virtually universal when discussing literary convention. Critics, poets, and reading audiences have typically chosen a single alternative, championing either tradition or innovation with a passion that has been fruitful in terms of poetry, practical criticism, and connoisseurship, but which has shed little light finally on the construction of sound principles of literary theory. With sometimes eloquent error or partial vision, readers and writers have devalued one end or the other of the spectrum of conventionality and in doing so have misrepresented the text.

Highly conventional texts are demanded by the audiences for oral and popular genres. Whether one thinks of the preliterate forms of epic poetry or of the mystery or “romance” novel of modern mass culture (not to mention non-literary forms such as African sculpture or Christmas tree decoration), highly conventional adherence to tradition is demanded of the artist. One may trace the theoretical justification for such an insistence in “high art” through critics such as Pope, Arnold, and Curtius.
However, since Romanticism, the impulse to privilege the new has been dominant in educated circles. Writers otherwise as different as Wordsworth, Pound, and Shklovsky have elaborated both theory and practice around this preference.

While the contention has produced a healthy polemicism (it is, after all, the original “battle of the books”) and has formalized a convention of literary history itself manifested in concepts like the canon and the avant-garde, it has led also to distortions. While it has opened the possibility for new modes of reading and writing, it has also created confusion about the very nature of the aesthetic text.

Meanwhile, in critical discussion in general, where theoretical distinctions are often not finely drawn or closely examined, certain elements from each party's attitude may be conjoined in an unselfconscious manner. Thus, a critic may seek initially for sources and influences with the assumption that these provide the credentials for "importance" and the encoding of meaning, and then in direct commentary on the text write as though what really distinguishes a major work is originality, irony, and innovation. Such habits of critical reading can never address such fundamental questions as how to deal with partially conventional ideas and verbal patterns which twist and play upon familiar models without reproducing them; what links exist between convention and genre or convention and literary value; and what, in the end, constitutes a distinctly literary convention.

The mélange of theories and non-theories around the question of the aesthetics of convention has shaped the evaluation of entire genres and periods. For instance, Manly's celebrated essay on “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians” not only determined several generations’ view of the Latin rhetoricians but also did much to set the terms for the appreciation and evaluation of Chaucer’s poetry. The common dismissal of most Middle English romances as poor and derivative work in spite of their demonstrable popularity and cultural significance is only a particularly clear case of the usual treatment accorded oral and popular genres. The prejudice against highly conventional works, though, extends as well to certain highly learned forms such as neo-Latin and Hellenistic poetry.

The taste for convention as a self-justifying value is similarly strangely split between the most vulgar and the most sophisticated. Thus a reader of limericks will insist to the same extent as fanciers of fugues on a predetermined pattern and tone, and the writers of bumper stickers as more constrained than Elizabethan sonneteers in their choice of patterns for their wit.

In the realm of academic scholarship, a commentator may do nothing more than point out analogues, parallels, precedents, and imitations, especially in the more abstruse disciplines such as classics. An unreflecting mixture of attitudes is evident in a fine practical critic such as Peter Dronke when he first dignifies a text with a traditional background in order to obtain it a hearing and then insists on the free and spontaneous play discernible within the apparently highly determined form without sorting out what effects either sort of relation to tradition might have or examining how adherences and departures from audience expectations function and interrelate.
The fact is, of course, that every instance of language and certainly every literary artifact is at once conformist and nonconformist. If an utterance did not conform to prior patterns at all it would be incomprehensible, or — more likely -- it would be interpreted by readers who perceived a pattern of their own invention. The fact that every context
and occasion is different guarantees that there can be no two wholly identical utterances. But this does not eliminate the questions under discussion by putting all verbal texts into a single homogeneous category. Both relatively familiar and relatively unfamiliar language are forms of verbal technology which have been exploited in different ways by their practitioners and consumers. Some of the functions for texts require material closer to one end of the spectrum and some to the other.

To move toward a more precise definition of these mechanisms is the object of this study, but some outlines of the uses of the two extremes are well-known. The concept of verbal economy as used by Lord and Parry could be applied as well to eighteenth century nature poetry, say, though this genre is certainly not oral. (See Alfred Lord, The Singer of Tales, Chapter 4.) Nonetheless, if formulae and repeated phrases reoccur with lesser frequency in James Thomson than in the epic texts, they are considerably more common than in some other genres. Pattern-shattering individualist visions have gained greater currency since the eighteenth century, and today every poet is expected to speak with a unique voice. Even this recent emphasis on self-conscious rebellion, however is rendered problematic as the gestures of surrealism rapidly become clichés, and the new theory which had arisen on the cutting edge of critical thought degenerates or matures into a predictable reflex (the received, “right” reading).

The theory and practice of literature in the European Middle Ages provides particularly useful material for the investigation of the problem of convention. Although the frequently expressed respect for “auctoritas” is consistent with the assumption that medieval literature is predominantly stereotyped and thus most often of little literary value (a claim made with audacious irony by Eco in The Role of the Reader). it has also long been a received idea that modern lyric poetry may be traced back through the dolce stil novisti and the Minnesänger to the troubadours. Medieval vernacular love poetry is surely one of the most highly conventional bodies of texts imaginable with its limited lyrical and melodic repertoire and its frequently recurring dramatic scenarios and sentiments. Even the idea of romantic love which is sometimes described as an invention of the Old Occitanian poets has been amply shown by Lewis and Dronke and others to have world-wide distribution as well as classical and Christian antecedents in the European cultural sphere.

Nevertheless, there is also a strain of radical formal experimentation through its history which attracted Pound to Arnaut and Walther von der Vogelweide and which led Paul Blackburn to translate the Provençal verse into emphatically colloquial and loosely structured American idiom, indeed, the poets themselves often speak of singing “a new song” or of the need to say something never before said and all but inaccessible to language. It is the contention of this study that the conservative and revolutionary elements of early vernacular lyric poetry are not simultaneously present by chance. Rather, each enables the other.

The apparent contradiction is mediated by the peculiar nature of literary intertextuality. The relations between a given poetic line and other lines that resemble it (which may come either before or after it in time) are invariably productive of meaning, resulting in a greater capacity for information in each phrase as the words bear not only their immediate “literal” meaning, but also their meaning in relation to other similar passages. The significance the text would convey in isolation (in practice an impossibility) is compounded and enriched by its connections with other words, sentiments, movements, and eras. Such intertextuality is inevitably present, but it is even more prominent when poets learn from the masters of a previous generation, from canonical texts digested in school, or from a particular model adopted by the young artist.

A strong tradition, then, cannot fail to make the semantic code denser, more conflicted, and ambiguous, more interesting and poetically “true.” It “thickens the plot,” and the verbal play that results is a highly important aspect of poetic practice, often recognized and elucidated in specific passages, but rarely investigated in theory. As well as foregrounding the formal aspects of poetic language (as, in the simplest case, certain locutions will immediately signal the competent audience that a given text is, in fact, poetry), intertextuality allows for the expression of content which would otherwise be inexpressible. Were this not the case, literature would be indistinguishable from non-aesthetic texts in terms of semantic efficiency, and it would be justifiable only as entertainment. The creation of meaning that is not susceptible to prose paraphrase has characteristics of a game, but the object is neither simple mystification nor ornamentation. Rather, it is the only means of formulating specifically literary statements whose unique capabilities justify literature's claim to cognitive utility.

This is, of course, far from an original view. Indeed, if it is substantially correct, it could not be wholly original, any more than the figures of the poets. Concepts very close to those suggested above are prescribed in the major works of the leading literary theoreticians around the time of the first European vernacular love lyrics to have survived. These were the Latin rhetoricians, notably Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Matthew of Vendome, and John of Garland. Though sometimes maligned as authors of recipe-books for hacks, as guides for those whose poetry aspired only to be acceptable, they were, in fact, quite conscious that to genuinely cultivate the tradition it was necessary to prescribe both tradition and innovation. Their techniques for thus increasing the efficiency of the verbal code include the catalogues of tropes and recommended descriptive and narrative practices derived from respected ancient authorities, but, at the same time, they advised using these with changes, tricks, deviations, with the end in view of “rejuvenating” language (though the term is Geoffrey’s, the concept is common to all three). Even in the lists of tropes, which seemed to grow with each compilation and which became truly unwieldy by the Renaissance, even there, where the charge of empty decoration is most close to valid, they were attempting the systematization of poetry's technical toolchest. For the most part, their strategies required words to bear new shades of meaning and old formulae were turned to new uses.

A closer examination of their work will establish the basis for an accurate understanding of the nature of convention in the Middle Ages, an understanding that will elucidate many of the questions commonly debated in critical discussion today. The practice they suggest is fully realized in the work of writers such as William IX and the early Minnesänger. It is no less evident in the medieval practice of prosody, in the use of such tropes as hyperbole, and in such topoi as the Natureingang. A rudimentary scheme of possible variations on the reverdie, for instance, might include these:


Spring is here, and I am in love.
Spring is here, and my love is even grander than nature.
Spring is here, yet I am loveless.
It is winter, yet my love keeps me warm.
It is winter, but I am chilled by lovelessness.


In fact, these formulae are highly simplified. The medieval poems provide all these options and a good many more with subtle elaborations, allusions, and contradictions, and the literary lineage continues through Eliot’s cruel April to the present. Each of those employing a convention do so not to replicate an earlier author, but to add a new layer of meaning to the palimpsest of language and to further refine the representation in words of human consciousness.