THE LANGUAGE OF NATURAL DESCRIPTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY,

by John Arthos '3O. Univ.of Michigan Press. 1949. pp. 463. $6.00.

Since the Romantic movement the "stock diction" of eighteenth century poetry has been held up to scorn. Rather than having attempted to understand what lay behind it most critics have been content to quote laughingly such periphrases as "scaly, breed" for fish and "radiant orbs" for stars in order to show how ridiculous the verse of what they call the "age of prose" was. Yet, within the past twenty years or so a realization has been growing, aided by the studies of such men as Bateson and Tillotson, that we have been unduly limiting our sensibility by rejecting as poetry the work of a whole age of English poets.

This book is another effort to help us to more fairly assess the whole problem of stock diction, particularly that used in the description of nature by the eighteenth century poets. It suggests that the stable vocabulary was the result of a view of the world as a stable harmonious balance of elements and that the charm of nature was in its sure constancy. Thus the function of poetry was to recreate this charm by drawing from the common store of accurate, truthful nature epithets.

To support this thesis the author has devised a book which, as he admits, is something like a dictionary. Three great lists of significant words, periphrases, and epithets with the suffix -y take up over four hundred pages-Such a form naturally limits the book to the specialists but he will find in it a wealth of interesting material.