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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The word verbal as it appears in the title of this essay looks in two directions or has two antitheses. In combination with the word style it designates a level of meaning distinct from the substantial, and especially from the stated part of substantial meaning. At the same time, verbal implies that the level of stylistic meaning is something different from what is expressed by the medium of any other art, and that the discussion will avoid such metaphors as “verbal painting” and “verbal music”—or if it employs them briefly, will do so in full overtness.
1 Cf. Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (New York, 1930), p. 227, n. 1, quoting with approval Professor Conington on “surplusage”; Richards, Principles of Criticism, chs. iii and xxv, the split between technical and value criticism; and Herbert Spencer's classic essay of this genre, “The Philosophy of Style.”
2 W. S. Jevons, Elementary Lessons in Logic (1934), p. 153.
3 Cf. my Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1941), chs. ii and iii.
4 I have discussed these areas of verbal style in my essay “When is Variation'Elegant' ?” College English, m (Jan., 1942), 368–383. Such examples as I have quoted just above, both prepositional strings and jingles, will doubtless be regarded by many readers and writers as faults (if faults at all) of simple cacophony. Complete avoidance of them is certainly a difficult, perhaps Quixotic, ideal. Yet I believe Fowler (Modern English Usage, -ly. 3) gives the correct diagnosis: “Euphony has nothing to say against repetition … if there is point in it …; but, when parallelism is not there to comfort her, Euphony at once cries out in pain.”
5 Mr. Kenneth Burke in his Lexicon Rhetoricae (Counter-Statement [New York, 1931], p. 157) distinguishes repetitive form from progressive, and under the latter distinguishes syllogistic and qualitative. Narrative form is apparently for him included under syllogistic. I believe it important to distinguish the two.
6 The kenning is a kind of poetic counterpart to Elegant Variation which I have discussed in my essay “When is Variation ‘Elegant’ ?” I exclude it from consideration here, as its meaning is far from purely verbal.
7 In some types of verse, in the Hebrew, in Skeltonics, or in the neoclassic couplet, lines and half-lines may be logical parallels, but here a counterpattern is usually created internally by the feet. The double set of equalities, feet and lines, makes it very difficult for meter ever to be a completely logical pattern.
8 The Poet's Tongue, ed. W. H. Auden and John Garrett (London, 1935), Introduction, p. vi.
9 For this reason no doubt the zeugma is the characteristic pun of prose. Empson (Seven Types [1947],p. 71) alludes to the frequency in Gibbon of such “little witticisms.” “Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation” (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. vii; Modern Library edition, I,153).
10 For various approximations to rhyme which have recently received names, see Stephen L. Mooney, “New Devices in Sound Repetition”, Word Study, xxrv, no. 4 (April 1949), 1–4.
11 “A Fable for Critics”, in Works (Boston, 1910), III, 29.
12 No doubt in the example just quoted the sense is too nearly logical.
13 Cf. my essays “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason: Alexander Pope”, MLQ, v (Sept. 1944), 323–338; and “Rhetoric and Poems: The Example of Pope”, in the English Institute Annual for 1948.
14 “Agnomination is a pleasant sound of words, or a small change of names; or it is a present touch of the same letter, syllable, or word with a different meaning” (John Smith, The Mysterie of Rhétorique Unvail'd [London, 1657], p. 105). Agnomination as treated by Smith and other rhetoricians is much like paronomasia (pun) : “Ab aratore orator. Be sure of his sword, before you trust him of his word.” For want of a better, I use the term as indicated above. Cf. O.E.D., Agnomination 3, Alliteration.
18 Perhaps there is too, as Wellek and Warren would point out, a certain initial symbolic fitness of the labials to suggest obscenity.
16 This example happens to differ from the “obscene dread of Moab's son” in that the main like-sounding words, though oblique or accidental in their semantic relation, are brought into parallel alignment by the structure. The obliquity of puns, rhymes, and agnomination in general may reside in semantics alone rather than in both semantics and structure. See my essay “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason”, pp. 328–334. Where pairing of ideas is emphatic, a degree of antithesis or paradox is likely to underlie phonetic likeness: “Imperial glamour with an impish glint.” And see the examples quoted in note 14.
17 Cf. the analysis of a Tennysonian line by F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language (Oxford, 1934), p. 21.
18 Dedication of Examen Poelicum, 1693 (Essays, ed. Ker, II, 10).
19 Cf. Dwight L. Bolinger, “On Defining the Morpheme”, Word, iv (April 1948), 22: “There are hints of meaning with vague resemblances of form at inferior levels, such as the n of un, in, non, nude, numb, nix, no, or the vowel of goof, boob, google …; but constituent analysis should stop before it reaches this stage.”
20 Anima Poelae (Boston, 1895), p. 91.
21 Internal rhymes of true root-forming morphemes are I believe rare. See Yeats' “He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro” (The Tower, Section II, stanza 6).
22 Cf. Bloomfield, Language (1933), pp. 396–398; R. J. Menner, “The Conflict of Homonyms in English”, Language, XII (1936), 229–244; “Multiple Meaning and Change of Meaning in English”, Language, xxi (1945), 59–76.
23 Menner, Language, xII, 242.
24 It is my impression that the French language, because of the great number of its silent letters and its general plasticity (consider, for example, sang, sens, sent, cent, sans, s'en) is more friendly than English to puns which could receive only a minimum defense along these lines. To mention a single striking instance, Clémont Marot's Petite Épislre au Roy makes thirteen “rimes équivoquées” on the root rithm-: e.g., en rithme-enrime, ma rithmaitte-marry maille, rilhmassé-Henry Macé, rithmelte-ris mette. For advice in this matter I am indebted to my colleague Professor Imbrie Buffum. See my essay, “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason”, p. 336, n. 58.
25 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Modern Library ed., p. 320). “Mouth, south”, speculates Stephen Daedelus. “Is the mouth south some way? Or the south a mouth? Must be some” (Ulysses, Cave of Winds chapter; Modern Library edition, p. 136).
26 Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne Langer (New York, 1946), p. 87.
27 “Imitation is the mesothesis of Likeness and Difference. The difference is as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be Copy or Fac-simile” (Coleridge, Table Talk, July 3, 1833, in Works [New York, 1884], vi, 468).