Ezra Pound, in ABC of Reading (1934), states that great literature is ‘language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree’. As a concise definition of great literature, could there be a more accurate statement than Pound’s?
Great writers use language with originality, mastery, and ingenuity. Writers who are not great have little originality beyond their individual voice (if they’re even lucky to have that) and use the language of great writers but charge it with meaning to a lesser degree.
Winifred Nowottny, in The Language Poets Use (1962), writes that ‘some poets in weighing words, are consciously as vigilant of the effects which may be produced by use of their corporeal characteristics as they are of their conceptual meanings’ and cites Paul Valéry as an example of archetypal poet creating a literary work by virtue of ‘looking for one word which has to satisfy at least six conditions’.
It is this conscious charging of language with meaning that contributes towards the difference between a great and non-great writer.
In Shakespeare’s twentieth sonnet, he demonstrates this attitude towards language, and thus demonstrates what makes his writing great.
Feminine endings have always been an accepted and commonplace technique in the language of English poetry but nowhere has it been used with more originality or charged with more meaning than in this sonnet:
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand paintedHast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquaintedWith shifting change as is false women’s fashion;An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.And for a woman wert thou first created,Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,And by addition me of thee defeatedBy adding one thing to my purpose nothing.But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.
Shakespeare, in writing about a ‘woman’s face’, uses the device of feminine endings consistently in the final foot of each line: ‘painted’, ‘passion’, ‘acquainted’, ‘fashion’, ‘rolling’, and ‘gazeth’.
He is aware of the name given to this technique, and the delicate connotations that are evoked from an unstressed syllable at the end of the line, so he marries this idea tightly to his subject matter to stimulate the idea of a woman’s face visually, aurally, and conceptually.
An example, for contrast, of a poet using the same technique but not in a great way, or at least in a way that does not approximate Shakespeare, is ‘Love’s Immaturity’ by E. J. Scovell.
Not weaned yet, without comprehension loving,We feed at breasts of love; like a still catThat wears and loves the fire in peace, till movingShe slips off fire and love, to cross the mat
As new as birth; so by default denyingHouse-roof and human friends that come and go,The landscape of life’s dreams. Antelopes flyingOver his wild earth serve the lion so.
We are blind children who answer with loveA warmth and sweetness. Those even we love mostWe sleep within their lives like cats, and roveOut in the night, and late return and coast
Their souls like furniture. Oh, life should giveLight till we understand they live, they live.
She uses the sonnet form with a sense of originality that arises only from a line-division to mask the fact that it is a sonnet, breaking the poem into three quatrains and a couplet.
Now this modernisation of the sonnet form has become commonplace and to use it would not display ingenuity but imitation.
Scovell uses the feminine ending in the final foot of a few lines, with words like ‘loving’ and ‘moving’, which seems to work well to reinforce her feline imagery but it is not original.
The language is charged with meaning but to a far lesser degree than Shakespeare. Scovell displays competence but not mastery.
Like feminine endings, inversion has long been a syntactical convention in the poet’s arsenal. To use it unconsciously, particularly by a contemporary poet, would appear contrived and archaic with a lack of originality and charged with less meaning.
In the chapter entitled ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ from The Jungle Book (1894), Kipling writes the following:
Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free –
The herds are shut in byre and hut,
For loosed till dawn are we.
It is in the fourth line that inversion is striking.
Even though spoken and everyday English would not be inverted, this does not appear odd because it is such a common convention of poetry.
Here Kipling is using inversion, not in an ingenious or completely self-conscious way, but purely to fit the metrical requirements of the ballad form.
He masters the musical quality necessary to make the sound of his poetry aesthetically pleasing but he is essentially using the technique of inversion because he has to and not because he wants to communicate something more through its application.
Joyce, on the other hand, uses inversion to great self-conscious effect and uses it to charge his language with meaning in the first line of his nineteenth poem from Chamber Music (1907):
Though I thy Mithridates were.
Joyce utilises inversion precisely because of its archaic connotations which compound, emphasise, and compliment the other archaisms that abound in his poem (in the first line alone he uses the archaic form of ‘your’ and makes reference to a figure from Greek history).
Further analysis of Joyce’s poem begins at 16:34 in this video.
Inversion here has the added effect of evoking a theme of powerlessness that is explored throughout the poem.
Joyce uses inversion in order to place his passive construction, ‘were’, at the end of the line which emphasises it.
The amount of effects achieved simply from the use of inversion here displays a density of meaning charged through language.
Among the early English novelists are examples of language used in original and great ways.
In Pamela (1740), Richardson uses an epistolary structure in order to more closely approximate reality and increase willing suspension of disbelief in the reader.
Using this form meant that language could be increasingly used to create tension and the present tense could be utilised (for example, Pamela writes ‘Here’s somebody coming!’). The use of the present tense added a new technique for writers to reflect their subject and aim through language.
This technique of epistolary form in the novel influenced works such as Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and modern writers who utilise the present tense are in the debt of writers such as Richardson.
Bret Easton Ellis uses the present tense consistently throughout American Psycho (1991) but, in a similar way to Joyce, is conscious of the effect he is trying to achieve and uses the opening and closing lines of his narrative to subtly reinforce that this is a fiction.
Opening line: ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank’; Closing line: ‘THIS IS NOT AN EXIT’
It could be seen that Melville, writing Moby Dick (1851) is so aware of the written language concerning his subject that has come before him that instead of allowing it to unconsciously inflect his writing, he uses it consciously and directly in his prologue by quoting Shakespeare’s and Milton’s references to whales, among many others, and presenting the etymology of the word itself.
In collecting references from the past together he acknowledges his debt to other writers and exploits this to create the idea of a whale’s horror from sheer amount of language alone.
If you haven’t already, go read the prologue to Moby Dick. It’s extraordinary.
The problem many writers have, which detracts from their greatness, is taking techniques of language for granted.
One example of a poetic technique that has been used since the earliest English poetry is that of personification.
In early Anglo-Saxon poems, such as The Dream of the Rood, prosopopoeia and other divisions of personification would resonate and strike the audience but since poetry has progressed writers content themselves with using it almost unconsciously.
For example, the personification of Death as a stereotypical and clichéd male figure in Dickinson’s poem ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ or the emotional and human connotations applied by Swinburne in ‘Love and Sleep’ when he describes his ‘sad bed’.
The uses here are poetic and achieve an effect that is often beyond writing of a less aesthetic quality but they are not original or creative and do not strike one as particularly great.
Another example of clichéd metaphor use would be in Davis’ ‘6 A.M. Thoughts’ in which he writes that his children are ‘Like puppies’. Use of metaphor such as this is already repetitive and cliché throughout the course of literature’s history. To make a comparison such as this would have been outdated even in Shakespeare’s time.
In the case of Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet, he is conscious of the cliché of comparing one’s love to a summer’s day and makes his own comparison original by asking ‘Shall I’, only to proceed to go against the cliché by taking its constituent parts and contradicting them.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
As Orwell has noted, in ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), one should never use ‘a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print’ and in doing so emphasises the argument that great writers use language with awareness and originality wheres non-great writers use it conventionally.