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7 - LITERARY LANGUAGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Sylvia Adamson
Edited by
Suzanne Romaine
Suzanne Romaine
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Introduction

The two revolutions

(1) Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself as, a return to common speech. That is the revolution which Wordsworth announced in his prefaces and he was right… and the same revolution was due again something over a century later.

(Eliot 1942)

T S. Eliot, like many other commentators, identifies two revolutions in the history of poetic language since 1776. The ‘revolution which Wordsworth announced in his prefaces’, conventionally known as the Romantic revolution, is commonly dated from the collaborative production of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. The second revolution – Modernism – has its equivalent landmark publication in Eliot's own The Waste Land of 1922, though the movement began over a decade earlier, with the arrival in London of Eliot's mentor Ezra Pound in 1908 and the impact of the first exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting in 1910.

In the years between 1910 and 1922, Eliot, Pound, and other members of their circle were anxious to stress the stylistic gulf dividing them from their nineteenth-century predecessors and to represent Modernism as a counter-revolution against Romanticism. But in (1), reviewing events from the retroperspective of the 1940s, Eliot emphasises instead the common ground between the two movements and defines this as ‘a return to common speech'. It's a definition that may seem paradoxical to those who share the belief, voiced by Larkin in (2), that Modernism fosters élitist and difficult forms of writing which remove literature from common speech:

(2) It seems to me undeniable that up to this century literature used language in the way we all use it, painting represented what anyone with normal vision sees . . . The innovation of ‘modernism’ in the arts consisted of doing the opposite.

(Larkin 1983)
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The Cambridge History of the English Language , pp. 589 - 692
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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