In the chapter of Nature (1836) entitled “Language,” Emerson finds the “root” of words to reside in “material appearance.” The apparently opaque word “supercilious” opens itself up, gives up (imagistically, even narratively) its literal meaning: the raising of the eyebrow. The Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky calls such literalisms “internal form,” and if he engineers similar linguistic unpacking it is not simply to demonstrate etymological curiosities — why, for instance, as he argues in “The Resurrection of the Word,” a candle called “tallow,” hence one made of animal fats, should not be called in the next line of a poem a “candle of ardent wax” (42, 43). There is more at stake than pedantry; both theorists seek to return the life-stuff to a dead language — or, in the resonating metaphor of resurrection, to bring dead matter back to life. The material of art “must be alive and precious,” writes Shklovsky, and invoking that peculiar myth of the linguistic Fall, of which Derrida provides the least remediable version, he rues “the journey from poetry to prose” (“Resurrection,” 42–43, 44). Submitted to common usage, words eventually lose their formal integrity (whether the “internal form” of “image” or the “external form” of “sound”) (“Resurrection,” 41). Emerson describes a similar degradation of language: “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry” (CW, 1: 19).