ABSTRACT
Extract from letter, 8 April 1742, to West: ‘As to matter of stile, I have this to say: The language of the age is never the language of poetry; except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose. Our poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost every one, that has written, has added something by enriching it with foreign idioms and derivatives: Nay sometimes words of their own composition or invention. Shakespear and Milton have been great creators this way; and no one more licentious than Pope or Dryden, who perpetually borrow expressions from the former. Let me give you some instances from Dryden, whom every body reckons a great master of our poetical tongue.—Full of museful mopeings—unlike the trim of love—a pleasant beverage—a roundelay of love—stood silent in his mood—with knots and knares deformed—his ireful mood—in proud array—his boon was granted—and disarray and shameful rout—wayward but wise—;furbished for the field—the foiled dodderd oaks—disherited— smouldring fames—retchless of laws—crones old and ugly—the beldam at his side—the grandam-hag—villanize his Father’s fame. 1 —But they are infinite: And our language not being a settled thing (like the French) has an undoubted right to words of an hundred years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible’ (publ. 1775; Correspondence of Thomas Gray (1935), ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, i. 192–193.)
