"Word: a sound, or combination of sounds, used in any language as the sign of a conception, or of a conception together with its grammatical relations…. A word is a spoken sign that has arrived at its value as used in any language by a series of historical changes, and that holds its value by virtue of usage, being exposed to such further changes, of form and of meaning, as usage may prescribe…." Century Dictionary.
"A word is not a crystal—transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a
living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to
the circumstances and the time in which it is used."
Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, Towne vs. Eisner.
"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of
prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;—poetry =
the best words in the best order."
COLERIDGE, Table Talk.
1. The Eye and the Ear
"Literary" language is commonly distinguished from the language of ordinary life by certain heightenings or suppressions. The novelist or essayist, let us say, fashions his language more or less in accordance with his own mood, with his immediate aim in writing, with the capacity of his expected readers. He is discoursing with a certain real or imaginary audience. He may put himself on paper, as Montaigne said, as if he were talking to the first man he happens to meet; or he may choose to address himself to the few chosen spirits of his generation and of succeeding generations. He trusts the arbitrary written or printed symbols of word-sounds to carry his thoughts safely into the minds of other men. The "literary" user of language in modern times comes to depend upon the written or printed page; he tends to become more or less "eye-minded"; whereas the typical orator remains "ear-minded"—i.e. peculiarly sensitive to a series of sounds, and composing for the ear of listeners rather than for the eye of readers.
Now as compared with the typical novelist, the poet is surely, like the orator, "ear-minded." Tonal symbols of ideas and emotions, rather than visual symbols of ideas and emotions, are the primary stuff with which he is working, although as soon as the advancing civilization of his race brings an end to the primitive reciting of poetry and its transmission through oral repetition alone, it is obvious that he must depend, like other literary artists, or like the modern musicians, upon the written or printed signs for the sounds which he has composed. But so stubborn are the habits of our eyes that we tend always to confuse the look of the poet's words upon the printed page with the sound of those words as they are perceived by the ear. We are seldom guilty of this confusion in the case of the musician. His "music" is not identified with the arbitrary black marks which make up his printed score. For most of us there is no music until those marks are actually translated into terms of tone— although it is true that the trained reader of music can easily translate to his inner ear without any audible rendering of the indicated sounds.
This distinction is essential to the understanding of poetry. A poem is not primarily a series of printed word-signs addressed to the eye; it is a series of sounds addressed to the ear, and the arbitrary symbols for these sounds do not convey the poem unless they are audibly rendered—except to those readers who, like the skilled readers of printed music, can instantly hear the indicated sounds without any actual rendition of them into physical tone. Many professed lovers of poetry have no real ear for it. They are hopelessly "eye-minded." They try to decide questions of metre and stanza, of free verse and of emotionally patterned prose by the appearance of the printed page instead of by the nerves of hearing. Poets like Mr. Vachel Lindsay—who recites or chants his own verses after the manner of the primitive bard—have rendered a true service by leading us away from the confusions wrought by typography, and back to that sheer delight in rhythmic oral utterance in which poetry originates.
2. How Words convey Feeling
For it must never be forgotten that poetry begins in excitement, in some body-and-mind experience; that it is capable, through its rhythmic utterance of words which suggest this experience, of transmitting emotion to the hearer; and that the nature of language allows the emotion to be embodied in more or less permanent form. Let us look more closely at some of the questions involved in the origin, the transmission and embodiment of poetic feeling, remembering that we are now trying to trace these processes in so far as they are revealed by the poet's use of words. Rhythm will be discussed in the next chapter.
We have already noted that there are no mental images of feeling itself. The images recognized by the consciousness of poets are those of experiences and objects associated with feeling. The words employed to revive and transmit these images are usually described as "concrete" or "sensuous" in distinction from abstract or purely conceptual. They are "experiential" words, arising out of bodily or spiritual contact with objects or ideas that have been personalized, colored with individual feeling. Such words have a "fringe," as psychologists say. They are rich in overtones of meaning; not bare, like words addressed to the sheer intelligence, but covered with veils of association, with tokens of past experience. They are like ships laden with cargoes, although the cargo varies with the texture and the history of each mind. It is probable that this very word "ship," just now employed, calls up as many different mental images as there are readers of this page. Brander Matthews has recorded a curious divergence of imagery aroused by the familiar word "forest." Half a dozen well-known men of letters, chatting together in a London club, tried to tell one another what "forest" suggested to each: