In “Descriptive Sketches” examples are still more numerous. Thus:
Soft bosoms breathe around contagious sighs
And amorous music on the water dies,
which might have come direct from Pope, or
Here all the seasons revel hand-in-hand
’Mid lawns and shades by breezy rivulets fanned.
The old epithet purple is frequently found (purple lights and vernal plains, the purple morning, the fragrant mountain’s purple side), and there are a few awkward adjectives in y (“the piny waste”), whilst a gun is described as the thundering tube.
Few poems indeed are to be found in the eighteenth century with so many fantastic conceits as these 1793 poems of Wordsworth. Probably, as has been suggested, the poet was influenced to an extent greater than he himself imagined by “The Botanic Garden,” so that the poetical devices freely employed in his early work may be the result of a determination to conform to the “theory” of poetry which Darwin in his precept and practice had exemplified. Later, the devices which had satisfied him in his first youthful productions must have appeared to him as more or less vicious, and altogether undesirable, and in disgust he resolved to exclude at one stroke all that he was pleased to call “poetic diction.” But, little given to self-criticism, when he penned his memorable Prefaces, he fixed the responsibility for “the extravagant and absurd diction” upon the whole body of his predecessors, unable or unwilling to recognize that he himself had begun his poetic career with a free use of many of its worst faults.[89]
Of the stock diction of eighteenth century poetry we may say, then, that in the first place it is in large measure a reflection of the normal characteristic attitude of the poets of the “neo-classical” period towards Nature and all that the term implies. The “neo-classical” poets were but little interested in Nature; the countryside made no great appeal to them, and it was the Town and its teeming life that focused their interest and attention. Man, and his life as a social being, was their “proper study”; and this concentration of interest finds its reflection in the new and vivid language of the “essays,” satires, and epistles, whilst in the “nature poetry” the absence of genuine feeling is only too often betrayed by the dead epithets of the stock diction each poet felt himself at liberty to draw upon according to his needs. It is scarcely necessary to remind ourselves that it is in Pope’s “Pastorals” and the “Homer,” not in the “Dunciad” or “The Essay on Man,” that the stock words, phrases, and similes are to be found, and the remark is equally true of most of the poets of his period. But Pope has been unjustly pilloried, for the stock diction did not originate with him. It is true that the most masterly and finished examples of what is usually styled “the eighteenth century poetic diction” are to be found in his work generally, and no doubt the splendour of his translation of Homer did much to establish a vogue for many of the set words and phrases. At the same time the supremacy of the heroic couplet which he did so much to establish played its part in perpetuating the stock diction, the epithets of which were often technically just what was required to give the decasyllabic verse the desired “correctness” and “smoothness.” But it is unjust to saddle him with the responsibility for the lack of originality evident in many of his successors and imitators.