And for the sake of clarity in your experiments you would probably be given these substances ‘pure’ or as pure as you could conveniently get them. IF YOU WERE STUDYING CHEMISTRY you would be told that there are a certain number of elements, a certain number of more usual chemicals, chemicals most in use, or easiest to find. (If you want really to understand what I am talking about, you will have to read, ultimately, Propertius and Jules Laforgue.) This is the last means to develop, it can only be used by the sophisticated. Thirdly, you take the greater risk of using the word in some special relation to ‘usage’, that is, to the kind of context in which the reader expects, or is accustomed, to find it. You use a word to throw a visual image on to the reader’s imagination, or you charge it by sound, or you use groups of words to do this. NEVERTHELESS you still charge words with meaning mainly in three ways, called phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia. He also divided them by their different associations. Dante called words ‘buttered’ and ‘shaggy’ because of the different NOISES the make. You have to go almost exclusively to Dante’s criticism to find a set of OBJECTIVE categories for words. There is no end to the number of qualities which some people can associate with a given word or kind of word, and most of these vary with the individual. That is, meanings which are more obtrusive than a word’s ‘associations’.īut tandem, or ‘bicycle built for two’, will probably throw the image of a past decade upon the reader’s mental screen. Numerals and words referring to human inventions have hard, cut-off meanings. You can hardly say ‘incarnadine’ without one or more of your auditors thinking of a particular line of verse. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably. The charging of language is done in three principle ways: You receive the language as your race has left it, the words have meanings which have ‘grown into the race’s skin’ the Germans say ‘wie einem der Schnabel gewachsen ist’, as his beak grows. And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. ‘Dichten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dichtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression.
‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’
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