Poetry became reduced,
as it never was before and has never been since, to a formula. The
Elizabethan sonneteers, as we saw, used a vocabulary and phraseology in
common with their fellows in Italy and France, and none the less
produced fine poetry. But they used it to express things they really
felt. The truth is it is not the fact of a poetic diction which matters
so much as its quality--whether it squares with sincerity, whether it is
capable of expressing powerfully and directly one's deepest feelings.
The history of literature can show poetic dictions--special vocabularies
and forms for poetry--that have these qualities; the diction, for
instance, of the Greek choruses, or of the Scottish poets who followed
Chaucer, or of the troubadours. That of the classic writers of an
Augustan age was not of such a kind. Words clothe thought; poetic
diction had the artifice of the crinoline; it would stand by itself. The
Romantics in their return to nature had necessarily to abolish it.
But when all is said in criticism the poetry of the earlier half of the
eighteenth century excels all other English poetry in two respects. Two
qualities belong to it by virtue of the metre in which it is most of it
written--rapidity and antithesis.
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