Milton's diction is the elaborated outcome of all the best words of
all antecedent poetry, not by a process of recollected reading and
storage, but by the same mental habit by which we learn to speak our
mother tongue. Only, in the case of the poet, the vocabulary acquired
has a new meaning superadded to the words, from the occasion on which
they have been previously employed by others. Words, over and above
their dictionary signification, connote all the feeling which has
gathered round them by reason of their employment through a hundred
generations of song. In the words of Mr. Myers, "without ceasing to be
a logical step in the argument, a phrase becomes a centre of
emotional force. The complex associations which it evokes, modify
the associations evoked by other words in the same passage, in a way
distinct from logical or grammatical connection." The poet suggests
much more than he says, or as Milton himself has phrased it, "more is
meant than meets the ear."
For the purposes of poetry a thought is the representative of many
feelings, and a word is the representative of many thoughts. A single
word may thus set in motion in us the vibration of a feeling first
consigned to letters 3000 years ago.
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