Poetic Power Research Articles

John Wordsworth and His Brother's Poetic Development

On 5 February 1805 John Wordsworth, the poet's brother, drowned when the ship he was commanding was wrecked off the English coast near Weymouth. No one would want to deny Ernest de Selincourt's assertion that his death was “the most terrible blow that either William or Dorothy had ever suffered”; it can easily be taken, as it often is, as the blow which signals the decline of Wordsworth's poetic power, his shift to Christianity, and his withdrawal into the isolation of Rydal Mount. There is justification for seeing in John's death such crippling force, but the story is more interesting and less conclusive, particularly as it relates to Wordsworth's poetic development, which is what will concern us here.

Big Daddy's Dramatic Word Strings

SOMETIMES YOU CAN BE TOO successful. Tennessee Williams was just that when he created the character of Big Daddy, who so dominates the second act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that Elia Kazan would not direct the play unless the third act were rewritten.1 The original version sent Big Daddy offstage at the end of the second act and allowed him only to groan in pain from the wings during the third. Kazan simply did not want to lose a character who generated so much dramatic excitement from the climactic moments of the play. His request had little to do with plot. The second act was almost overwhelming because of Big Daddy; the third act, without his reappearance, would be a letdown beyond any director's ability to trick things together. What is the excitement about Big Daddy? How does he succeed in arousing the emotion of the audience to such a high pitch of admiration and active concern? To a certain extent it is by his dramatic function, but that does not fully explain it. After all, the plot is simply that old hack theme of who is going to be included in the family will-the how and the why of the hungry heirs. A dying patriarch who has yet to dispose of his property need not necessarily be sympathetic or even dramatically exciting. But the way Tennessee Williams does him, he is both. The explanation is in his use of language. Big Daddy is a rough, crude poet who can command and strategically employ both bombast and lyricism. He delights us with the poetic power of his speech, while carefully maintaining the pose of a man who contemns culture. To do this successfully, he must stay within the circumscribed word choice of slang. Anything fancy would be peculiar or precious, and he is, therefore, forced to fall back upon the natural rhythms of local speech for his effect. This is his starting place. Just how he maneuvers into more complex patterns is the interesting secret of his dramatic

The Librarian as Author: Some Poets

EVERYBODY seems to write verse at some time or other, because nothing is easier to write than technically correct metrical language. Without the fine poetic power, the art of song is short, not long, and those there be that easily have grasped it in an hour. That is one reason, I suppose, for the fugitive verses that adorn all periodicals and are occasionally collected into little volumes which are the ephemerae amongst books, issued with many vain hopes. Lancashire folk know that Samuel Laycock, whose collected writings appeared in 1900, was a true bard. His “Bonny Brid,” one of the Lancashire Lyrics, written during the cotton famine, 1861–65, is more than an echo of social history; it is a song which Burns would not have despised. And Laycock served for six years as librarian and hall‐keeper to the Stalybridge Mechanics' Institute, where he acted as host to the various clubs meeting there, making tea for them amongst other activities. That is by the way. It is a far cry to William Robert Credland, who was deputy librarian at Manchester when I began. He wrote, in his later years, an irregular sonnet on Edward Edwards which cannot now be found. I remember, however, that to a meeting of the L.A. Publications Committee in 1912 the late Herbert Jones read it in his mellifluous and sonorous voice, and only the opening remains thus in my mind—