The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry. By David-Antoine Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. viii+390.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry. By David-Antoine Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. viii+390.Stephanie BurtStephanie BurtHarvard University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNeither the sound of a word nor its history provides a metaphysically or intellectually reliable guide to its present-day use and force. Poets, however, sometimes write as if such a guide could exist, or as if their poems could provide one: these imaginary guides stand behind, or direct, some recent poets’ major works. So David-Antoine Williams concludes in this learned, careful, insightful study of how these poets take account of etymology: not only the histories and the origins of words, but also the stories we tell about them, whether or not we believe them.According to a durable myth—or story or philosophical axiom—the present-day meanings of words, along with their sounds, conceal the truths in their Proto-Indo-European (PIE), or perhaps Edenic or Hebrew or archaic Greek, beginnings. To reactivate the history of a word is to make available for one’s own modern poem these truths, to return the phonemes and graphemes that make up a language to their nonarbitrary, cosmic roots. Martin Heidegger sometimes seemed to believe as much, with his hope to connect “origin, truth, primacy and propriety” (31). So did the Christian Hebraists of John Milton’s time, and the “Latin-speaking early Christians” who heard malum (sin) in mālum (apple) and saw more than coincidence or pun (27). So did such ambitious modern poets as Charles Olson, who promised his followers a way of writing (and reciting, and even breathing) that could extend “from the root out,” from the “Aryan root, as, to breathe” (“Projective Verse” [1950; repr., Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse]).Such claims run exactly counter to Saussurean linguistic theory, and to modern historical study, with its emphases on “the non-teleological nature of linguistic development” (35). Signs are not referents, not even in PIE. We have, instead, only words and their empirically, imperfectly researchable histories. And yet those histories give—as Williams shows—contemporary poets ways to make poems: etymology, false or true, conjectured or historically supported, mystified or demystified, supports the verse-making strategies—and the various attitudes toward truth and art—in Williams’s chief subjects, Seamus Heaney, J. H. Prynne, R.F. Langley, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.I have arranged those names not in Williams’s order (though Williams, too, puts Muldoon last) but in order of their decreasing faith in the truths about human life, and ethics, and civilization, and Britain or Ireland, provided by the histories of words. Heaney tends to place his trust in language, or languages (Latin, English, Irish) even when he distrusts himself; Muldoon, as his critics generally agree, trusts no one entirely—his “epistemology is largely negative” (255). He remains a nominalist not only in the philosophers’ sense (words and names need not signify anything real) but in the sense that he loves onomastics, performs stage magic with proper nouns. He sounds like the only one among Williams’s figures who would take Plato’s side in the Ion.And yet even Muldoon, perhaps counterintuitively, sometimes presents his art as akin to Ion’s, or perhaps to Olson’s: the language speaks through him, with its “vast underground net of unseen connections” (210), such as the Beatles’ “play on ‘album’ and ‘white’” (208) (Latin albus). Muldoon’s literary criticism (if that’s what his lectures are) stands beside his verse in its “radical, reciprocal performance of the interconnectedness … amongst Irish, English and world literatures” (236).In between these two Irish men stands (among others) Hill. Pursued by moral obligations to history and to national identity and to a God who may or may not talk back, we cannot (that is, Hill cannot) wholly honor those obligations in a present day built on lies, in a fallen world where original sin is a thing (185), where true etymology, like true theology, cannot be disarticulated from “errors made in language” (183). “So far I’m with you,” Hill ventures, “conglomerate roots / of words. I wish I could say more… . Words are at one with all / corruptible things” (156, 166). Hill’s poetry “calls on one to work at one’s answer, to work one’s answer through” (193), to pursue linguistic and spiritual remedy, if not redemption. The poems are work, and they feel like work, and at their best they feel like Milton’s work, laboring in a dark world to choose the right.This kind of work, in Hill, reveals his own compelled struggle to comprehend our fallen selves. In Prynne it appears to comprehend, well, everything: “elements that cohere in our present reality (such as electricity, or current social conditions, or language itself) or have cohered in our past (such as literature, or philosophical systems)” (142). Prynne’s 2011 prose poem Kazoo Dreamboats, or On What There Is becomes not only “a dream vision” like Piers Plowman but also an “extended attempt at the establishment of an alternative ontology, which might form the basis for an alternative metaphysics, and ethics” (140). These ethics, in turn, emerge from—that is, they emerge as Prynne makes his art from—“the whole prior history of the language community,” as the poet himself has said (137).Such goals are—to quote the cartoonist Allie Brosh—“alot,” and like Brosh’s cartoon beast the alot, the implied author in Prynne’s later poems is “better than you at everything” (https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html). Using his knowledge of etymology and historical linguistics, along with his command of electromagnetics and Mao Zedong thought (145), this immensely learned and—in Britain at least—influential writer sets himself up as the man who understands (albeit dialectically) everything that can be understood, constructing (what has failed all working physicists so far) a Grand Unified Theory tying the undeniable depredations of modern capital to the internal workings of subatomic matter-energy, as “each of the contradictory aspects within a thing transforms itself into its opposite,” “rolling like wheels contrary within themselves” (145). That’s not Miltonic, and it’s not historical, and it is only coincidentially linguistic: it may be Hegelian, or Yeatsian, or Maoist, though W. B. Yeats (or perhaps George Yeats) famously admitted that the systems of A Vision had come to give him metaphors for poetry. Prynne writes as if he has learned how the world really works; his latter-day readers may choose whether we can believe him.R. F. Langley’s verse textures may resemble Prynne’s, as his etymologically grounded puns resemble Prynne’s and Hill’s and even Muldoon’s. “The pebbles / vanish when it comes to calculation” (129) (from Latin calculus, “pebble”); closely watched flowers’ “bodies seemed / incorporate with their / names” (120) (from Latin corpora). It is—or was—Langley’s genius that from such recalcitrant subtleties, such grainy texture, even from “the romantic essentialism that customarily attends the etymological fallacy” (129), poems of inviting and painstaking and even friendly observation emerge. Williams shows just how Langley (unlike most contemporary poets) grounds every one of his polysemies not only in his own experience of English but in the history of the English language: “I don’t take risks beyond the etymology,” Langley has said (114). Such risk aversion means that his verbal discoveries never feel merely idiosyncratic. “Writing through etymology,” as Langley always did, “makes one’s experience a part of history” (114). We might say the same of that other long underrated, never prolific birdwatcher-poet Elizabeth Bishop.All these poets’ work solicits, and rewards, the heavy lifting and referential delving that Williams (whose list of “references” comprises two pages of English, German, Hebrew, Irish, Latin, and PIE dictionaries, above and apart from his Works Cited [259–61]) performs. What matters to Williams is not whether the etymologies in the poems are accurate according to present-day standards but whether they feel like “word-work,” not just “wordplay” (69), whether the poem, discovering what appear to be truths in the roots of its words, may “convince me, not of its beliefs, but of its believing. This believing in its own correctness raises its linguistic arrangements above the level of paranomasia” (75). Whether or not “[Gerard Manley] Hopkins did understand ‘earliest’ and ‘earl’ to share a common origin” (70–71), when he invokes “earliest stars, earl stars, | stars principal” he sounds as if he did, and that sound of work is the sound that Williams pursues.His pursuit brings delights and limits, within these particular writers’ work and outside it. Introductory chapters cover word-work, PIE, “onomastic pseudo-etymologies” (81), and what we might call etymological historiography (now-discredited histories of language) in early scholars such as W. W. Skeat and in a triple handful of poets, from Wordsworth and Milton to Ciaran Carson, Anne Carson, Anne Waldman, and the wonderful neorococo American Angie Estes, whose “poem ‘Curio’ resorts to the Latin etymology of the title word to set up a metaphor comparing souls to hams” (85). Williams’s white, male English and Irish focal poets (Heaney, Langley, Prynne, Hill, and Muldoon) do not so much use word-work differently from Estes or Carson; rather, they use it consistently, making it into a structural element rather than an occasion or ornament in the poems they build.That said, Estes’s rococo poetics collapses the space between structure and ornament: she could have furnished another whole chapter, had Williams space enough and time. For Estes, as for Hill and Prynne and Heaney and Langley, etymologically oriented polysemy seems consistent enough, and self-conscious enough, and thematically relevant enough, that we can view it apart from the general polysemies on which so many more poets depend. When etymological work seems occasional, however effective, we may not be able to distinguish it from larger matters. Tonya M. Foster writes, “Bullets can / pepper a body, like salt falling”: Does the antonymic force of Latin saltāre, “to leap,” against “falling,” affect the rest of Foster’s poem (A Swarm of Bees in High Court [Brooklyn, NY: Belladona, 2015], 63)? Terrance Hayes writes, “You assassinate my tongue / Which is like the head of a turtle wearing my skull for a shell” (American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin [New York: Penguin, 2018], 17). Should we care whether shell (PIE *skal-) shares a root with skull (origin unknown), or turtle, via tortoise, testudo, testa, with a Latin word for shell?And that said, the potential for other chapters, extending the argument to other poets, is hardly a flaw in any scholarly book: it’s more like a sign that the scholar has done their job, explaining an important mechanism for making beauty and meaning, one that each major writer deploys in their own odd way. For Muldoon that way is teasing, evasive, almost parodic; for Prynne it is the way of genius, in Bob Perelman’s ambivalent sense of “genius”: “the labor required to make [Prynne’s] writing legible has to be justified, ultimately, by the value that writing embodies, but that value has most often to be transmitted through hearsay as the writing remains illegible or semilegible for any reader who is not” already a devotee (The Trouble with Genius [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 1). If only we could inhabit its dialectic, we might know our place in the world.That place, in turn—and here lies the heaviest limit on this thoughtful, responsible, charitable study—is for Williams a place of archaelogy and study, a place of writing, reading, rereading, and texts, as well as an English or sometimes Irish place, “English” and “Irish” naming both nation and language. Do English-language poets whose nations began as white settler colonies—the United States, say, or New Zealand—manifest, in the multiple meanings that our poems deploy, the same attention to the history of English amid other Indo-European languages? Is Estes an outlier? What about poets, like Christopher Okigbo (whom Hill commemorated) or Singapore’s terrific Ng-Yi Sheng, who derive their forms and genres from the non-Indo-European, non-Semitic languages in their polyglot nations? What about poets who depend less on text meant to be reread than on the performances of their poems aloud? Do they use etymology differently, if at all? These are questions that Williams does not reach, questions his good book leaves for scholars to come. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 119, Number 4May 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719384 Views: 731 HistoryPublished online February 23, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.