Beth, David, all ---
Is this thread leading into, or out of, the wandering wood? It's not pre-Raphaelite, but as an aid to the imagination of a post-Morris Arcadia, I would suggest Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando.' If anyone's working on a syllabus testing the proposition that 'endurable' language must be artificial, and as far as possible from 'our slack and often frivolous idiom,' 'Orlando' is a candidate. I confess, though, that only the movie version got me to the end of the story.
Cheers, Jon Quitslund
> Despite David's compelling and thoughtful reflections on handling irate
> undergraduates, what really grabbed my attention in his post was the following:
>
> >In all seriousness, though, I don't think Tolkien has anything to apologize
> >for in the way of style. It is, admittedly, an artificial style. But this
> >is not, ipso facto, a demerit. Cf. what C. S. Lewis said about William
> >Morris: "It is, of course, perfectly true that Morris invented for his
> >poems and perfected in his prose-romances a language which has never at any
> >period been spoken in England...The question about Morris's style is not
> >whether it is an artificial language--all endurable language in longer
> >works must be that--but whether it is a good one...I cannot help suspecting
> >that most of the detractors when they talk of Morris's style are really
> >thinking of his printing: they expect the florid and the crowded, and
> >imagine something like Sidney's Arcadia
>
> I am now trying in vain to imagine a pre-Raphaelite *Arcadia*, and I tip my
> hat to any of Morris's detractors who apparently could. Nor am I having
> much success with the necessary corollary, a Gilbert and Sullivan parody of
> a pre-Raphaelite Arcadia--although at least there the complications both
> possible and impossible in the plot wouldn't pose any unusual difficulty.
>
>
> BQ
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