11 - Diction

Summary

This chapter examines the opposition between, on the one hand, an approach to diction as the index of broader poetic, historical, and social formations (e.g., genre, period, and class) and, on the other hand, an approach to diction as the expression of an individual poem's singularity, whereby the choice and the meaning of every word is specific to that poem. The chapter then considers two nineteenth-century examples, neither of which neatly fits this dichotomy: George Gordon Byron's Don Juan and Catherine Fanshawe's “Lord Byron's Enigma.” The first of these subversively amalgamates multiple, generally available vocabularies into its own idiosyncratic vernacular, while the second produces singular effects out of an entirely formulaic lyrical diction. The chapter thereby proposes that diction reveals in the individual poem a constitutive tension between singularity and exemplarity.