For oratory words should be
winged, that they may do their work of persuasion. For poetry words
should be freighted, with associations of feeling, that they may
awaken sympathy. It is the suggestive power of words that the poet
cares for, rather than their current denotation. How laughable are the
attempts of the commentators to interpret a line in Virgil as they
would a sentence in Aristotle's _Physics!_ Milton's secret lies in
his mastery over the rich treasure of this inherited vocabulary. He
wielded it as his own, as a second mother-tongue, the native and
habitual idiom of his thought and feeling, backed by a massive frame
of character, and "a power which is got within me to a passion."
(_Areopagitica_)
When Wordsworth came forward at the end of the eighteenth century with
his famous reform of the language of English poetry, the Miltonic
diction was the current coin paid out by every versifier. Wordsworth
revolted against this dialect as unmeaning, hollow, gaudy, and
inane. His reform consisted in dropping the consecrated phraseology
altogether, and reverting to the common language of ordinary life.
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