7/11.08

One interesting thing I wrote yesterday: I had meant to write that I'm interested in "language that strains..." but I wrote "language that sprains"--I think that's just about right, isn't it? language that hurts itself--it's body?--a little bit because it does something a little bit off or because of bad luck, but that still isn't shattered beyond repair.

Modern poems often try to sprain language (or to break it, of course) in a way that I find interesting. I'm equally interested, though, in the times that the Elizabethans sprained language, and particuarly those times that they did it that someone objected.

Drayton and Spenser, in particular, are constantly trying to explain what it is they mean and why it is that they are entitled to talk about it in the way that they are. To me, that suggests two things:
1) the poet doesn't assume that the audience will recognize his periphrasis, or metaphor, or allusion
2) the poet believes these things are a more powerful way of achieving whatever goal it is that he wants to achieve

It seems to me that to a large extent they're right on both counts--generally the things they explain are either obvious to modern readers (who have read the poetry of their successors all our lives) or would have been obvious a couple of generations in. In some ways, this is a flip-side of the anxiety of influence--the way poets stretch the language in order to achieve effects that they could not have otherwise. All sorts of poetic practice are justified by reading Shakespeare, who /must/ have been straining his audience's ability to comprehend. Mus'n't he? Or is it just that the /reading/ of Shakespeare encouraged people to start trying to produce effects in writing that Shakespeare did on the stage? That may be an undecidable question.

So what are the ways in which this two-part model can go wrong? One way is to try to sprain English in a way that has classical license and have yur audience not accept it. (Most people working in this fashion don't consider what it is that they're doing to be spraining the language, necessarily.)

One danger is that you won't have considered the consequences of your sprain and bad meaning will break into your text. This is the danger that Puttenham is protecting against--types of devices that preserve meaning versus types that distort it.

You can waste people's time, because your effects don't work, or you can make a Bad Thing because you handle them badly. Goose giblets wrapped in waste paper.

Or, you can have effects that are not the effects you intend, and lock someone in a church, or mess with the pronunciation of words.


My argument is that in the Renaissance, all of these possibilities were available in a way that they weren't for later criticism--people later didn't have quite the same faith in words efficacy and had more sense of an English tradition that could justify usage.

A usage borrowed from the Latin, after all, still needs justification in English, for fear that people will miss what you're doing. A usage borrowed from Jonson, Donne, or Drayton doesn't, really. It's one of the things that allusion within a tradition can do that allusion across traditions does differently.