The sensuous and longing lines of the first epigraph to this chapter, from F.T. P rince's early poem ‘Words from Edmund Burke’, are part of one of his many dramatic monologues. In this poem, ‘Burke’ outlines his ‘exertions’ in literature, philosophy and a range of writings as he tries to ‘give the truth my voice, truth to my voice’ hoping to ‘The rich web so establish, while words are, while time is’ (CP, 28). Words and time are pressing and there is a paucity of each as Burke tries to establish the ‘rich web’ of his aspirations. As these closing lines of the poem illustrate, Prince dramatises Burke's apparent frustrations not only through what he says, but also through knotty syntax, repetition and parataxis. While Burke states that words and time elude him, the awkward mode of expression throughout the poem illustrates this lament on a different level. Similarly, the lines quoted in the epigraph formally dramatise the type of holistically physical and exerting labour which Burke's work apparently involves. The impression we get is one of a writer whose creations require the activity of a range of senses: ‘my eyes’, ‘my tongue’, ‘Drink with my own looks, touch with my own hands’. Just as the worlds, ‘constructions’ and subjects he tackles seem cobbled together by a form of sensual exertion, so the syntax, line endings and grammar contort awkwardly like a phenomenal realisation of the struggle of creation. Burke seems to cling on for dear life, as Prince puts it, ‘to the forms [he has] laboured to obtain’ (CP, 27).

In ‘Words from Edmund Burke’, Prince connects intellectual and literary labour with physicality and his language and syntax are comparably muscular and knotted; lines and grammar contort and contract with the subjects described.