‘I AM not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.’—DR. JOHNSON, Preface to Dictionary of the English Language.
William Rossetti, in his Foreword to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, says: ‘Whitman’s language has a certain ultimate quality’.
It is this ‘ultimate quality’ in language, — and ‘speech above a mortal mouth’, to quote from Ben Jonson’s Discoveries — that is needed in the poetry of to-day.—E. S.
‘… The grammar, the arid grammar itself, becomes something like an evoked sorcery, the words are alive again in flesh and in blood, the substantive, in its substantial majesty, the adjective, a transparent vestment that clothes and colours it … and the verb, angel of movement.’—BAUDELAIRE, Les Paradis Artificiels. Trans, and quoted by Arthur Symons.
Furious old lady, complaining of my own poems: ‘Words, Words, nothing but Words’.
Not only words, my dear lady. Yet see what only words will do for us. Compare these lines,
‘And we’ll gang nae mair a-rovin,
A rovin in the nicht,’
from ‘The Jolly Beggar’, by James V of Scotland, and the final lines of Byron’s ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’, a poem that begins with lines which are almost those of King James, but ends with
‘Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.’
—E. S.