>Except (and dave will love this) it virtually seems as if there was a concerted effort to blast Street Speech out of poetry between about 1720 and 1900.<
I do! Cheers, Rob.
2008/5/25 Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>:
> I've being doing some work on this recently (on cant in English Writing) and
> it's maybe as well to start sticking some time-stamps on what we're tossing
> around.
>
> To seriously oversimply, it's as well to forget even any indirect reflection
> of non-middle-class standard speech before printing -- i.e. about 1530.
>
> Where it all goes seriously skew whiff is about 1720, when you actually *can
> begin identify "authentic" Street Speech in poetry -- not just occasionally,
> but as a continuity.
>
> Except (and dave will love this) it virtually seems as if there was a
> concerted effort to blast Street Speech out of poetry between about 1720 and
> 1900.
>
> Nothing new under the sun, and there must be quite a few (most of whom --
> Thomas Mount, David Haggart, Jack Sheppard -- are probably howling with
> laughter in their quicklime graves) ...
>
> But the real joker in the pack is it sucks in even "respectable" poets --
> Swift's "Clever Tom Clinch" makes less than complete sense if you detach it
> from the street ballads of the time.
>
> Boy, does the whirligig of time ever exact its revenges!
>
> The Glagow Language Wars of the Sixties could be seen as a simple reprise of
> the editorial fiascos emnbedded in Stephen Farmer's _Musa Pedestris_.
>
> Makes you wonder, but.
>
> <g>
>
> R.
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
|