Exhaustive Guide to Poetic Diction, Structure, and Voice

The Significance of Word Choice and Diction in Poetry

• Word Economy and Density: Literature is fundamentally made of words. In novels, such as Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Bleak House, the sheer volume of words is vast. In contrast, a lyric poem typically ranges from a couple to a couple hundred lines, containing between a dozen and a few thousand words. Because the count is so small, each word inherently carries more weight than those in a Victorian "triple-decker" novel.

• The Lack of Privileged Language: Poetry does not own the words it uses. Unlike scientific or technical fields, there is no specialized, exclusive language for poetry. Poets must use language that has been devalued by general use and occasionally rendered unusable by shifts in social context.

  • The Case of "Gay": Before approximately $1970$, phrases like "hearts are gay" were used without ambiguity. Following the appropriation of the word by the gay pride movement, the word's "charge" changed comprehensively, altering audience perception forever.
  • Official and Deaden Language: Documents such as insurance regulations or letters are designed to be impersonal and can "deaden" language. Similarly, propaganda uses language to obscure motives and misrepresent actions rather than clarify them.

• The Struggle Against Linguistic Resistance:

  • French Symbolist Poets: Figures like Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud decried the dilemma of using devalued language for art in the late $19\text{th}$ century.
  • Geoffrey Hill's Theory: Poetry struggles against the "inertial drag of speech." In his essays "Redeeming the Time" and "Our Word Is Our Bond," Hill argues that language exerts a gravitational pull and provides resistance. This resistance—the struggle to overcome language's limitations—is where poets achieve their art.
  • Making It New: This struggle leads to the impulse to "make it new" (per Ezra Pound). Modernist and Postmodernist examples include Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," and Craig Raine's "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home."

Defining Diction and its Components

• Diction Explained: Diction refers to the selection of words alone and in combination, modes of phrasing, and the specific use of metaphor and simile. For example, choosing "settles upon" over "settles on" reflects a grammatical preference that may sound "stiff" to some but historically preferred to others.

• Levels of Word Attraction:

  • Semantic Level: The literal meaning of words.
  • Syntactic Level: How words nestle among their neighbors.
  • Aesthetic Level: The visual and oral appearance. Written words have visual aesthetics (e.g., clusters of consonants), while oral language concerns sound (light and airy vs. sturdy and heavy).

• The Richness of English: As a Germanic language, English imports vocabulary from diverse sources: French, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Dano-Norwegian, Inuit, Algonquian, and modern techno-speak or slang. This provides a dizzying array of choices for "content words."

The Historical Context of English Vocabulary

• The Impact of $1066$: The Battle of Hastings, where William, Duke of Normandy, defeated King Harold, marks the transition from purely Germanic Old English to a language with a heavy French overlay.
• Linguistic Pairings in Law: Legal documents used pairings to be clear to both Anglo-Saxon and Norman French speakers. Example: "give, bequeath (Old English) and devise (Old French)."
• Class Distinctions in Vocabulary:
  • Germanic (Old English): Shorter, harsher, and often regarded as cruder (e.g., four-letter rude terms for bodily functions).
  • French/Latin: Longer, softer, more formal, or euphemistic (e.g., "fornication," "defecation," "urination").
• Diction Mashups: In Philip Larkin’s "Church Going" ($1955$), he describes a church as an "accoutred frowsty barn."
  • Accoutred: French, meaning "all decked out."
  • Frowsty: $19\text{th}$-century British slang corruption of "frowsy," meaning musty/stale.
  • Barn: Plain Old English, originally the house that stored barley.

Breaking the Standard: Dialect and Grammatical Disruption

• E. E. Cummings' Linguistic Rebellion: In "anyone lived in a pretty how town," Cummings uses "nouning verbs" and "verbing nouns."

  • Syntactic Disruption: Lines like "with up so floating many bells down" throw word order out the window, forcing the reader to hear the sense rather than follow traditional models.
  • Semantic Shift: "He sang his didn't he danced his did" uses grammatical placeholders to suggest negation/affirmation or nonbeing/being.

• The Use of Dialect: Dialect involves using words from a specific ethnic, regional, or national tradition. It can be alienating but also creates an "unearthly language" of kinship.

  • Robert Burns: Significant enough that his birthday ($January\text{ }25$) is an international celebration. In "To a Mouse," he uses Scots words like "stibble," "hald," "thole," and "cranreuch" (hoarfrost).
  • Paul Laurence Dunbar: Known for his "Minors" (dialect poems) and "Majors" (Standard English poems). His poem "Compensation" demonstrates his mastery of standard English, which he used to reach diverse audiences while his dialect poems remained controversial for their use of caricature.

Mechanics and Forms of Rhyme

• Types of Rhyme:

  • End Rhyme: Most common, appearing at the ends of lines (e.g., Blake’s "Tyger").
  • Internal Rhyme: Rhymes occurring within a single line (e.g., Poe’s "The Raven": "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary").
  • Identical Rhyme: Using the same word twice (e.g., "double, double" in Macbeth).
  • Feminine Rhyme: Rhyming two or more syllables (e.g., "trouble" and "bubble").
  • Slant Rhyme: Approximate rhymes (e.g., "trouble" and "rumble").

• Terza Rima: An interlocking rhyme scheme formatted as $ABA-BCB-CDC-DED-EFE-FGF-GHG$.

  • Introduced by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy ($1320$).
  • Brought into English by Geoffrey Chaucer in the $14\text{th}$ century.
  • Used by Robert Frost in "Acquainted with the Night" to maintain a sense of forward motion.

The Identity of the Speaker and the Implied Author

• The Poet vs. The Speaker: A poem is an imaginative utterance, not a court deposition. It is a mistake to assume the "I" in a poem is the poet themselves.
• The Implied Author: A term introduced by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction ($1961$). It is a "phantom" set of attitudes perceived through the text, distinct from the real author who eats oatmeal in the morning.
• Case Study: "The Road Not Taken": Often misinterpreted as a call to individualism, it is actually about the narrative we construct after the fact. The speaker admits the paths were worn "about the same" and "equally lay," but plans to tell others with a "sigh" that he took the one "less traveled by."
• Confessional and Romantic Poets: Poets like Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell seem to inhabit their verse personally. However, even "Tintern Abbey" is based on "emotion recollected in tranquility" rather than a spontaneous diary entry. There is always logic, artifice, and a degree of irony between the artist and the poem.

Figurative Language: Images, Symbols, and Conceits

• Word-Pictures: Figurative language acts as a deflection of meaning. Examples include:
  • Image: A simple picture made of words (e.g., Shakespeare describing an old man as a tree in autumn).
  • Simile: Comparison using "like" or "as" (e.g., Homer comparing Diomedes to a river in spate; Burns comparing love to a "red, red rose").
  • Metaphor: A comparison without "like" or "as," involving a "vehicle" (the carrier) and a "tenor" (the subject). I. A. Richards coined these terms.
• Extended Metaphors and Conceits: A conceit is an extended metaphor that controls the entire poem.
  • John Donne: Used the conceit of a flea representing a marriage bed in "The Flea," and a geometric compass representing lovers in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" ($1613$).
  • Edna St. Vincent Millay: In Sonnet $42$, she uses the imagery of a wintry tree and vanished birds to represent the loss of youth and forgotten lovers.
• Symbolism vs. Allegory: While allegory is a one-to-one substitution (e.g., Love = Rose), a symbol has a multiplicity of meanings. Robert Frost's symbols—birches, rock walls, forking paths—point toward universal human conditions without providing simple, singular answers.

The Form of the Sonnet

• Geometry: The sonnet is famously described as "square" because it consists of $14$ lines written in iambic pentameter. Typically, $10$ syllables of English text are approximately as wide as $14$ lines are high on a page.
• Ubiquity: It is the most versatile and ubiquitous lyric form in English poetry, known for its brevity and rigorous structure.

Questions & Discussion

Q: Wait a minute. You mean we're going to go crazy over a bunch of frills and ribbons?A: Not at all. Diction ain't frilly. Diction includes non-standard modes like "ain't" or colloquial addresses like "Buster."

Q: So what is it, exactly?A: Think of diction as the four of the five Ws of journalism: Who, What, When, Where, and How, which leads to Why. We dissect the text to understand how the writer's choices affect our experience of the work.