Bernard Wall
QUESTIONS OF LA NGUAGE
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
T. S. Eliot,
East Coker.
The problem of language as a vehicle for poetic and literary
expression has arisen with peculiar force in our time. Doubtless
language has always involved difficulties of choice and selection
whether these were overcome unconsciously by instinctive taste, or
this instinctive taste was reasoned about in the way pursued by Dante
in his
De V ulgari eloquentia.
But difficulties like those of Dante have
only a partial resemblance- and perhaps one which is largely mis–
leading-with the self-conscious hesitations and the intellectual prob–
lems which have arisen with us. One is tempted to say that Homer
and Shakespeare or other vast figures who made or enriched languages
were born in ages in which the anonymous work of the people, or
a fortunate association of circumstances, provided the epic poet or
the dramatist with a strong and ready-made vehicle for his expression:
that people in the heroic age of Greece talked like Homer and the
Elizabethan English talked like Shakespeare. So that whereas a mod–
ern poet-says Mr.
T.
S.
Eliot~annot
write as he talks, in the
current idiom of his tin1e, but instead needs to develop, with much
searching of intellect and feeling, another kind of language which
tends to have a "private" character owing to the "unusualness" of his
beliefs and his knowledge, Shakespeare wrote his plays aln1ost straight
off without needing to change what he wrote down.
Obviously this is an exaggeration, and we know that epic lan–
guage was not talked by carpenters, yet it raises some interesting
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