Bob
a slow cooking on this: literary poets before Wordsworth used 'natural'
speech as a given if they were writing on subjects that were considered
appropriate to it, thus Restoration wags like Rochester or satirists like
Pope or Dryden or burlesque writers like Butler or Gay wrote in what was the
conversational style of their peer groups unless they were aiming for ironic
effect. High style was for the epic and heroic tradition: for Spenser or
Milton or the monologues of tragic heroes in the drama, go further back and
it's true too of the Gawaine poem or Beowulf or Homer. Wordsworth though
wrote an epic in a style that veered towards the contemporary, although it
certainly wasn't without a touch of Milton. Yes, I can see the aptness of a
comparison to WCW, though some other 20th century writers of 'long' poems,
like MacDiarmid or Pound or Jones or Zukofsky (I guess) in some respects
resuscitated the use of a special more self-consciously literary style
compounded of archaisms, neologisms, and rare words as well as the demotic.
It is though in all cases a matter of literary style, 'natural speech' in
writing is an illusion that writers spend a great deal of effort in
obtaining. One of the ironies of the favour for a dumbdown style of poetry
in some quarters is that people DON'T speak like that (in clonking rhymes)
or indeed that natural speech doesn't resemble poetry very much at all -
most speech is incomplete, partial;, rushed, and above all tone and gesture
and body language comprise much if not most of the meaning. Even among the
highly formal speakers of 18th century upper-class English Thomas Gray was
considered most unusual in that he spoke in the manner of composed literary
prose.
One of my strong suspicions is that what we think of as 'poetry' is a result
of writing, far back, even before Homer, in the Land of the Two Rivers; or
to be more exact, a result of the need to make writing 'speak'.
best
dave
On 9 September 2011 16:06, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Wait a minute Bob: Is prose natural? We must remember that famous Moliere
> quote, but it was satiric.
>
> How 'natural' are the various forms of conversation in, say, Wilde? Or any
> number of fiction writers?
>
> That's a very ambiguous area, I suspect…
>
> As David said, it's all rhetoric, of one kind or another….
>
> Doug
> On 2011-09-09, at 5:40 AM, Bob Grumman wrote:
>
> > I dunno about "every bit," Dave. Free verse has to be more natural than
> formal verse, assuming prose to be natural. But if you want to go with
> something like "general-public speech" versus "specialist-group speech"
> instead of "natural" versus "artificial," I won't protest. Wordsworth
> always seemed pretty high-style to me, but at the time I suspect his
> language seemed an order or magnitude closer to the common speech, or speech
> of the majority, than that of those preceding him. Shakespeare's may have,
> too, for all I know. Lots of specialized mythology for a modern reader, but
> much less than other poets of the time used, for instance. Interesting
> subject I haven't read enough to do more than make impressionist stabs
> about.
> >
> > all best, Bob
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
>
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> People say they have to express their emotions.
> I'm sick of that. Photography doesn't teach
> you to express your emotions;
> it teaches you how to see.
>
> Berenice Abbott
>
--
David Joseph Bircumshaw
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