Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Upcoiling, and inveterately convolved;
Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane.
But the bulk of eighteenth century latinisms fall within a different category; rarely do they convey, either in themselves or in virtue of their context, any of that mysterious power of association which constitutes the poetic value of words and enables the writer, whether in prose or verse, to convey to his reader delicate shades of meaning and suggestion which are immediately recognized and appreciated.
CHAPTER V
ARCHAISM IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY
One of the earliest and most significant of those literary manifestations which were to culminate in the triumph of Romanticism was a new enkindled interest in the older English writers. The attitude of the great body of the so-called “Classicists” towards the earlier English poetry was not altogether one of absolute contempt: it was rather marked by that indifference which is the outcome of ignorance. Readers and authors, with certain illustrious exceptions, were totally unacquainted with Chaucer, and though Spenser fared better, even those who did know him did not at first consider him worthy of serious study.[122] Yet the Romantic rebels, by their attempts to imitate Spenser, and to reveal his poetic genius to a generation of unbelievers, did work of immediate and lasting value.
It is perhaps too much to claim that some dim perception of the poetic value of old words contributed in any marked degree to this Spenserian revival in the eighteenth century. Yet it can hardly be doubted that Spenser’s language, imperfectly understood and at first considered “barbarous,” or “Gothic,” or at best merely “quaint,” came ultimately to be regarded as supplying something of that atmosphere of “old romance” which was beginning to captivate the hearts and minds of men. This is not to say that there was any conscious or deliberate intention of freshening or revivifying poetic language by an infusion of old or “revived” words. But the Spenserian and similar imitations naturally involved the use of such words, and they thus made an important contribution to the Romantic movement on its purely formal side; they played their part in destroying the pseudo-classical heresy that the best, indeed the only, medium for poetic expression was the polished idiom of Pope and his school.